My Ántonia
1918
The prairie remembers what we forget. In Willa Cather's masterpiece, Jim Burden looks back on a childhood in Nebraska where everything important happened: the arrival of the Shimerda family from Bohemia, the first sight of Ántonia with her braided hair and impossible vitality, and the years of friendship, longing, and loss that followed. Jim and Ántonia are both exiles from somewhere else, both transplanted to the vast Nebraska plains as children, both marked forever by the experience. This is a novel about what survives: memory, love, the fierce grip of the past on who we become. Cather writes with the compression of poetry about a landscape that shapes souls, about immigrant families forging new lives in unforgiving soil, and about a girl who never stopped burning. Over a century later, readers return to it for what it offers: proof that some bonds transcend time, that the country we carry within us matters more than the country we walk through.
Editions
X-Ray
“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.””
— Willa Cather
“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.””
— Willa Cather
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.””
— Willa Cather
“Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.””
— Willa Cather
“Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.””
— Willa Cather
“I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered-- about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.””
— Willa Cather
“I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.””
— Willa Cather
“There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.””
— Willa Cather
“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.””
— Willa Cather
