Quotes from book
O Pioneers!

Name: O Pioneers!
Author: Willa Cather

Willa Cather

O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by American author Willa Cather, written while she was living in New York. It is the first novel of her Great Plains trilogy, followed by The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia .

“Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over, and she didn't see the use of it. After she had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she's come back she's been perfectly cheerful, and she says she's contented to live and work in a world that's so big and interesting. She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it's what goes on in the world that reconciles me.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part II, Ch. 4
O Pioneers! (1913)

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part II, Ch. 8
O Pioneers! (1913)

“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part II, Ch. 4
O Pioneers! (1913)

“We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part V, Ch. 3
O Pioneers! (1913)

“She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part I, Ch. 5
O Pioneers! (1913)

“There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part IV, Chapter 1 : "The White Mulberry Tree"
O Pioneers! (1913)

“Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part I, Ch. 2
O Pioneers! (1913)

“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.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part I, Ch. 5
O Pioneers! (1913)

“The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain — until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part IV, Ch. 5
O Pioneers! (1913)

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part II, Ch. 4
O Pioneers! (1913)
Context: There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

“The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part I, Ch. 9
O Pioneers! (1913)
Context: The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

“Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part II, Ch. 3
O Pioneers! (1913)
Context: Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him... We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.