The three quarters began. The first note sounded, measured and tranquil, serenely peremptory, emptying the unhurried silence for the next one and that’s it if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up for an instant then blown cleanly out along the cool eternal dark instead of lying there trying not to think of the swing until all cedars came to have that vivid dead smell of perfume that Benjy hated so.
When we saw her again her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows – sort of tragic and serene.
Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man’s but all men’s, as light and air and weather were.
He was working fast, yet thinking went slow enough. He knew why now. He knew now that thinking went slow and smooth with calculation, as oil is spread slowly upon a surface above a brewing storm.
And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it’s like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.
It’s a comfortable thing, music is.
Meet Mrs. Bundren, he says.
All the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.
Ellen was in her late thirties, plump, her face unblemished still. It was as though whatever marks being in the world had left upon it up to the time the aunt vanished had been removed from between the skeleton and the skin, between the sum of experience and the envelope in which it resides, by intervening years of annealing and untroubled flesh.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past; it’s always part of the present.
Read anthing, trash or trashier; and listen to thrash. Espceially 83-90 era. They will absorb you. You will be in dire need of beer. Now that’s something you must be picky of.
The bells were ringing again, high in the scudding sunlight in bright disorderly tatters of sound.
There remains yet something of honor and pride, of life.
Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death.
It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.
Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock.
All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.
I love, I will accept no substitute;... ; if happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
I was a little crazy. You know how it is, how you want to rush into something you know is going to happen, no matter what it is. I guess lovers and suicides both know that feeling.
Nothing can marry two people closer than a mutual sin in the world’s eyes.