Extended excerpt: [Fictional dialogue – ‘The Bishop’ to ‘Bernard’. Punctuation & italicized segment original to text.]

“Bernard, will you ride into Santa Fé to-day and see the Archbishop for me. Ask him whether it will be quite convenient if I return to occupy my study in his house for a short time. Je voudrais mourir à Santa Fé.”

“I will go at once, Father. But 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.” (p. 267) 

Source: Library – Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927 | June 1990 Vintage Classics edition) International Standard Book Number ISBN) 0-679-72889-9

Extended excerpt: [Excerpt from fictional letter to ‘Hilda,’ from ‘Alexander]

“Happiness like that makes one insolent. I used to think these four walls could stand against anything. And now I scarcely know myself here. Now I know that no one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression are never welded.” (p. 128)

Extended excerpt  [Letter to the editor]:

“The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual: those who were not have been long forgotten. The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter; considerations and purposes which have nothing to do with spontaneous invention. The great body of Russian literature was produced when censorship was at its strictest. The art of Italy flowered when the painters were confined almost entirely to religious subjects. In the great age of Gothic architecture sculptors and stone-cutters told the same stories (with infinite variety and fresh invention) over and over, on the faces of all the cathedrals and churches of Europe. How many clumsy experiments in government, futile revolutions and reforms, those buildings have looked down upon without losing a shadow of their dignity and power – of their importance! Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”

Source link: “Escapism: A Letter from Willa Cather” (1936 – text posted online 1 Mar. 2014) Commonweal Magazine: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/escapism-letter-willa-cather

Extended excerpt: [Fictional narrative]

“The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. (p. 20)

Extended excerpt: [Fictional narrative ]

“I do not remember crossing the Missouri River, or anything about the long day’s journey through Nebraska. Probably by that time I had crossed so many rivers that I was dull to them. The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.” (p. 5)

Source link: My Ántonia (1918) Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska: http://cather.unl.edu/0018.html

Extended excerpt: [Fictional dialogue, ‘Carl’ to ‘Alexandra’]

“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.” (p.119)

Extended excerpt: [Fictional dialogue, ‘Thea Kronborg’ to ‘Dr. Archie,’ ‘Fred Ottenburg’]

“That’s the whole trick, in so far as stage experience goes; keeping right there every second. If I think of anything else for a flash, I’m gone, done for. But at the same time, one can take things in—with another part of your brain, maybe. It’s different from what you get in study, more practical and conclusive. There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. You learn the delivery of a part only before an audience.” (p. 443)

Source link: The Song of the Lark (1915) Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska: https://cather.unl.edu/0007.html

Extended excerpt: [Fictional narrative]

“The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.” (p. 304)

Extended excerpt [Fiction, Chapter IV. Cited Project Gutenberg source does not include page numbers.]:

“This delightful room had seemed to me a place where light-heartedness and charming manners lived – housed there just as the purple curtains and the Kiva rugs and the gay water-colours were. And now everything was in ruins. The air was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me seemed evil. When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.”

Source link: My Mortal Enemy (1926) online via Project Gutenberg Australia: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500321h.html

Extended excerpt: [Fictional narrative]

“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.” (p. 206)

Source link: My Ántonia (1918) Willa Cather Archive, University of Nebraska: http://cather.unl.edu/0018.html