My mother is a fish.
Memory believes before knowing remembers.
You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
She wouldn’t say what we both knew. ‘The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won’t you say it, even to yourself?’ She will not say it.
As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
It’s because I’m alone... If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.
The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.
Read, read, read.
And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.
It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.
On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.
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.