"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young"
About this Quote
The genius is in the verb “try.” It admits effort, even goodwill, then denies it any payoff. Cather isn’t condemning youth as shallow or elders as irrelevant; she’s pointing at the structural loneliness of aging. Experience doesn’t transfer cleanly. Advice arrives with invisible baggage: the risks you survived, the sacrifices you normalized, the social rules you mistook for nature. To the young, that can sound like superstition. To the old, the young can seem willfully amnesiac.
Context matters: Cather wrote amid massive cultural acceleration - immigration, industrial modernity, World War I’s psychic break, shifting gender roles. When the world is reinventing itself at speed, the past doesn’t merely feel “different”; it feels unreachable. Her prairie and frontier sensibility also informs the thought: life built from hard choices fosters a belief in earned knowledge, yet she recognizes how quickly a new generation treats that knowledge like antique furniture.
Under the sting is a quieter fear: if the young can’t hear the old, then the old are rehearsing for death while still alive.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Cather, Willa. (2026, January 15). The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-dead-might-as-well-try-to-speak-to-the-living-156267/
Chicago Style
Cather, Willa. "The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-dead-might-as-well-try-to-speak-to-the-living-156267/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-dead-might-as-well-try-to-speak-to-the-living-156267/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
