… is from page 220 of Joseph Epstein’s September 2013 essay “Willa Cather” as this essay is reprinted in the 2018 collection of some of Epstein’s essays titled The Ideal of Culture:
She steered clear of politics in her writing, feeling that those with “zeal to reconstruct and improve human society seem to lose touch with human beings and with the individual needs and desires which make people what they are.”