“Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security.”
Part I, Ch. 5
O Pioneers! (1913)
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Willa Cather 99
American writer and novelist 1873–1947Related quotes
Early Autumn : A Story of a Lady (1926)
Context: She had turned her back upon them all and no awful fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and made of it a fine, even glittering, success; and this is a thing which is not easily forgiven. <!-- p. 8
Black God's Kiss (1934); p. 23
Short fiction, Jirel of Joiry (1969)
Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas
1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nature
“Even so a crowd of nestlings, seeing their mother returning through the air afar, would fain go to meet her, and lean gaping from the edge of the nest, and would even now be falling, did she not spread all her motherly bosom to save them, and chide them with loving wings.”
Volucrum sic turba recentum,
cum reducem longo prospexit in aere matrem,
ire cupit contra summique e margine nidi
extat hians, iam iamque cadat, ni pectore toto
obstet aperta parens et amantibus increpat alis.
Source: Thebaid, Book X, Line 458 (tr. J. H. Mozley)
“She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly — but at a distance.”
On his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, Chapter 1 (Childhood).
My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930)
Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)
Context: Nature … is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as those which govern all physical effects; nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature's actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible.<!-- ¶18