Our Home in Literature - Willa Cather

"Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. [In the country] you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones... We are all alike, we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners... All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own... We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder." - O Pioneers! by Willa Cather