Willa Cather Quotes

These were some of my favorite parts from her book, Death Comes for the Archbishop.

pg 289 Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

On Death pg 267 "...You should not be discouraged; one does not die of a cold." The old man smiled. "I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived."

On Farming and Wilderness pg 273 He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost the lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

On the Death Bed pg 288 He observed also that there was no longer any perspective in his memories. He remembered his winters with his cousins on the Mediterranean when he was a little boy, his student days in the Holy City, as clearly as he remembered the arrival of M. Molny and the building of his Cathedral. He was soon to have done with the calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible. Sometimes, when M or B came in and asked him a question, it took him several seconds to bring himself back to the present. He could see they thought his mind was failing; but it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life- some part of which they knew nothing. When the occasion warranted he could return to the present. But there was not much present left; ....only the minor characters of his life remained in present time.