What sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury he can efface by destroying the victim and the witness but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter.
Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it won’t be memory because it won’t know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. -Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.
I said I have committed incest father I said.
About women? When I say soldiers I don’t mean me. I wasn’t no soldier anymore than a man that fixes watches is a watchmaker. And when I say women I don’t mean you.
An old man is never at home save in his own garments: his own old thinking and beliefs; old hands and feet, elbow, knee, shoulder which he knows will fit.
It’s Cash and Jewel and Varadaman and Dewey Del’, pa says kind of hangdog and proud too, with this teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. ‘Meet Mrs Bundren’, he says.
Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done.
Younger citizens of the town do not know him at all save as a tall, apparently strong and healthy man who loafs in a brooding, saturnine fashion wherever he will be allowed, never exactly accepted by any group.
It’s like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it for anything else very important.
Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
I don’t like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65.
I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.
Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
You will find that even injustice is scarcely worthy of what you believe yourself to be.
He’s crossed all the oceans all around the world.
He had been too successful, you see; his was that solitude of contempt and distrust which success brings to him who gained it because he was strong instead of merely lucky.
Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
And that wasn’t the first time it ever occurred to me that this world ain’t run like it ought to be run a heap of more times than what it is.
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.