Carson

“She walked slowly down through the orchard, where the evening air was heavy with the smell of wild cotton. The fresh, salty scent of the wild roses had given way before this more powerful perfume of midsummer. Wherever those ashes-of-rose balls hung on their milky stalks, the air about them was saturated with their breath.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“the struggle to become takes place not “out there” in the world, but “in here” in what we call intimate relations. Cather once observed that in all families the “struggle to have anything of one's own, to be one's self at all, creates a strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point. . . . One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life: that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“The right thing is usually just what everybody don't do.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers

“Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.”
― Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life