Quote#Nature
My familiar spirit is like an old wild turkey that forsakes a feeding…
Quote byWilla Cather · 1873–1947
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher (27 February 1924), published in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (2013), edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout.
English (original)
My familiar spirit is like an old wild turkey that forsakes a feeding ground as soon as it sees tracks of people-especially if the people are readers, book-buyers. It's a crafty bird and it wants to go where there aint no readers That's the truth: they go and paw a place all up and spoil it for me. It isn't my secret anymore.
— Willa Cather
More from Willa Cather
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to the sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war.
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do 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 …
The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.