"He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, — these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, — and this would always be his."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from the United StatesShort story writers from the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesBiographers from the United States20th-century poets from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
A Lost Lady (1923), Part II, Ch. 9
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Willa_Cather
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Willa Cather
101 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Willa Cather →
Related Quotes
"All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in capt…"
"No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike…"
"There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through y…"
"It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of."
"The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west,…"
"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young."
"The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wid…"
"Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and conc…"
"My familiar spirit is like an old wild turkey that forsakes a feeding ground as soon as it sees tracks of people-espe…"
"Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer."