# Quote — Willa Cather, My Antonia

> On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.

- Author: [Willa Cather](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather.md)
- Book: [My Antonia](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/my-antonia.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Willa_Cather#My_Antonia_(1918)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/my-antonia/on-starlight-nights

## More from this book

> Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/my-antonia/men-are-all.md)

> As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/my-antonia/as-i-confronted.md)

> In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/my-antonia/in-the-course.md)