I prefer to think that no writer has got time to be too concerned with style, that he is simply telling this dramatic instance in the most effective way he knows, that the book, the story, creates its own style.
I only write when the spirit moves me... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi.
Again. Sadder than was. Again. Saddest of all. Again.
At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were.
Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.
A dream is not a very safe thing to be near, Bayard. I know; I had one once. It’s like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it’s a good dream, it’s worth it. There are not many dreams in the world, but there are a lot of human lives. And one human life or two dozen – – ” “Are not worth anything?” “No. Not anything. – Listen.
I never said anything more. it doesn’t do any good. I’ve found that when a man gets into a rut the best thing you can do is let him stay there.
He was wrong; he knew he was when it was too late for him to stop just as a drunkard reaches a point where it is too late for him to stop, where he promises himself that he will and maybe believes he will or can but it is too late.
I’ve done what I could; a man that can live as lone as I have and not know when to quit is a fool.
Man the sum of his climatic experiences.
Above the counter where the ranks of crisp shapes behind the glass her neat gray face her hair tight and sparse from her neat gray skull, spectacles in neat gray rims riding approaching like something on a wire, like a cash box in a store. She looked like a librarian. Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done.
It is jealousy, I think, which makes us wish to prevent young people doing the things we had not the courage or the opportunity ourselves to accomplish once, and have not the power to do now.
But who knows why a man, though suffering, clings, above all the other well members, to the arm or leg which he knows must come off?
Beyond the bordering weeds a fence strangled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds beside it the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed there – skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they.
And so if Cash nails the box up, she is not a rabbit.
Time? Time? Why worry about something that takes care of itself so well? You were born with the habit of consuming time. Be satisfied with that.
She accepted that – not reconciled: accepted – as though there is a breathing-point in outrage when you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, ’thank God, this is all; at least I now know all of it –.
People will pay any price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles.
He just stood and looked at his dying mother, his heart too full for words.
Then that had passed. It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books;.