Darl
The summer when he was fifteen, he took a spell of sleeping. (128)
Darl
Ma wanted to get the doctor, but pa didn't want to spend the money without it was needful, and Jewel did seem all right except for his thinness and his way of dropping off to sleep at any moment. He ate hearty enough, except for his way of going to sleep
Darl
And that may have been when I first found it out, that Addie Bundren should be hiding anything she did, who had tried to teach us that deceit was such that, in a world where it was, nothing else could be very bad or very important, not even poverty. (130)
Darl
He came up along the ditch and then turned straight across the field, riding the horse. Its mane and tail were going, as though in motion they were carrying out the splotchy pattern of its coat: he looked like he was riding on a big pinwheel, bare-hacked,
Darl
She cried hard, not hiding her face, standing there in her faded wrapper, looking at him and him on the horse, looking down at her, his face growing cold and a little sick looking, until he looked away quick and Cash came and touched her. (135)
Darl
That night I found ma sitting beside the bed where he was sleeping, in the dark. She cried hard, maybe because she had to cry so quiet; maybe because she felt the same way about tears she did about deceit, hating herself for doing it, hating him because s
Vernon Tull
The water was cold. It was thick, like slush ice. Only it kind of lived. One part of you knowed it was just water, the same thing that had been running under this same bridge for a long time, yet when them logs would come spewing up outen it, you were not
Vernon Tull
Like it couldn't be me here, because I'd have had better sense than to done what I just done. (139)
Vernon Tull
I be durn if it wasn't like he come back and got me; like he was saying They won't nothing hurt you. Like he was saying about a fine place he knowed where Christmas come twice with Thanksgiving and lasts on through the winter and the spring and the summer
Vernon Tull
Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. But he don't like to admit it to them until they have beards. (140)
Darl
He lifts the horse. It shrinks, bowed; he leans to it, speaking to it, lifting it forward almost bodily, it setting its feet down with gingerly splashings, trembling, breathing harshly. (144)
Darl
When he was born, he had a bad time of it. Ma would sit in the lamp-light, holding him on a pillow on her lap. (144)
Darl
It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between. (146)
Darl
I felt the current take us and I knew we were on the ford by that reason, since it was only by means of that slipping contact that we could tell that we were in motion at all. (147)
Darl
The head of one mule appears, its eyes wide; it looks back at us for an instant, making a sound almost human. (149)
Vernon Tull
Then she begun to sing again, working at the washtub, with that singing look in her face like she had done give up folks and all their foolishness and had done went on ahead of them, marching up the sky, singing. (153)
Vernon Tull
He looked like he was laying there in the water on his face, rocking up and down a little, looking at something on the bottom. (155)
Darl
His face appears sunken a little, sagging from the bony ridges of eye sockets, nose, gums,as though the wetting had slacked the firmness which had held the skin full; his teeth, set in pale gums, are parted a little as if he had been laughing quietly. (15
Darl
In the wagon bed it lies profoundly, the long pale planks hushed a little with wetting yet still yellow, like gold seen through water, save for two long muddy smears. (157)
Darl
I had not thought that water in July could be so cold. It is like hands molding and prodding at the very bones. (158)
Darl
We submerge in turn, holding on to the rope, being clutched by one another while the cold wall of the water sucks the slanting mud backward and upstream from beneath our feet and we are suspended so, groping along the cold bottom. (159)
Darl
Against the jungle Jewel's horse looks like a patchwork quilt hung on a line. (162)
Darl
It looks peaceful, like machinery does after you have watched it and listened to it for a long time. (163)
Darl
From here they do not appear to violate the surface at all; it is as though it had severed them both at a single blow, the two torsos moving with infinitesimal and ludicrous care upon the surface. (163)
Darl
Squatting, Dewey Dell's wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth. (164)
Cash
It wasn't on a balance. (165)
Cora Tull
She had never been pure religious, not even after that summer at the camp meeting when Brother Whitfield wrestled with her spirit, singled her out and strove with the vanity in her mortal heart... (166)
Cora Tull
Because it is not us that can judge our sins or know what is sin in the Lord's eyes. (167)
Cora Tull
She has had a hard life, but so does every woman. (167)
Cora Tull
She just sat there, lost in her vanity and her pride, that had closed her heart to God and set that selfish mortal boy in His place. (168)
Cora Tull
I prayed for that poor blind woman as I had never prayed for me and mine. (168)
Addie
In the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them. (169)
Addie
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. (169)
Addie
Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever. (170)
Addie
I saw him pass the school house three or four times before I learned that he was driving four miles out of his way to do it. (170)
Addie
I noticed then how he was beginning to hump-a tall man and young-so that he looked already like a tall bird hunched in the cold weather, on the wagon seat. (170)
Addie
And when I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it. (171)
Addie
That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don't ever fit even what they are trying to say at. (171)
Addie
My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle. (172)
Addie
He did not know he was dead, then. (173)
Addie
...and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words. (174)
Addie
I did not even ask him for what he could have given me: not-Anse. (174)
Addie
I would think of sin as I would think of the clothes we both wore in the world's face, of the circumspection necessary because he was he and I was I; the sin the more utter and terrible since he was the instrument ordained by God who created the sin, to s
Addie
I hid nothing. I tried to deceive no one. I would not have cared. (175)
Addie
I knew at last what he meant and that he could not have known what he meant himself, because a man cannot know anything about cleaning up the house afterward. (176)
Addie
She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too. (176)
Addie
And then I could get ready to die. (176)
Whitfield
When they told me she was dying, all that night I wrestled with Satan, and I emerged victorious. (277)
Whitfield
It was His hand that bore me safely above the flood, that fended from me the dangers of the waters. (178)
Whitfield
My horse was frightened, and my own heart failed me as the logs and the uprooted trees bore down upon my littleness. (178)
Whitfield
I knew then that forgiveness was mine. (178)
Whitfield
My soul felt freer, quieter than it had in years; alreadyI seemed to dwell in abiding peace again as I rode on. (178-179)
Whitfield
I entered the house of bereavement, the lowly dwelling where another erring mortal lay while her should faced the awful and irrevocable judgment, peace to her ashes. (179)
Darl
He had that wooden look on his face again; that bold, surly, high-colored rigid look like his face and eyes were two colors of wood, the wrong one pale and the wrong one dark. (181)
Darl
He applies the curry-comb, holding himself within the horse's striking radius with the agility of an acrobat, cursing the horse in a whisper of obscene caress. (183)
Armstid
But time I give him another sup of whisky and supper was about ready, he had done already bought a team from somebody, on a credit. (184)
Armstid
Then he began to mumble in his mouth, looking at me like it was me that owned the only span of mules in the county and wouldn't sell them to him, when I knew that like as not it would be my team that would ever get them out of the lot at all. (185)
Armstid
Like he says, a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or horse has got a little more sense. (185)
Armstid
They shoved them under the side of the bed, where he could reach his hand and touch them when he felt better. (186)
Armstid
But soon as I see them it was like I could smell it in the field a mile away from just watching them, and them circling and circling for everybody in the county to see what was in my barn. (187)
Armstid
There must have been a dozen of them setting along the ridge-pole of the barn, and that boy was chasing another one around the lot like it was a turkey and it just lifting enough to dodge him and go flopping back to the roof of the shed again where he had
Armstid
He just looked at me with his jaws going bone-white and them bone-white eyes of hisn, then he went and begun to call Darl. (187)
Armstid
He looked kind of funny: kind of more hangdog than common, and kind of proud too. Like he had done something he thought was cute but wasn't so sho now how other folks would take it. (189)
Armstid
He begun to mumble again, standing there like he was waiting for somebody to hit him and him with his mind already made up not to do nothing about it. (190)
Armstid
I be durn, if a man can't keep the upper hand of his sons, he ought to run them away from home, no matter how big they are. And if he can't do that, I be durn if he oughtn't to leave himself. (191)
Armstid
Because be durn if there aint something about a durn fellow like Anse that seems to make a man have to help him, even when he knows he'll be wanting to kick himself next minute. (192)
Vardaman
We watch them in little tall black circles of not-moving. (194)
Vardaman
Cash is sick. He is sick on the box. But my mother is a fish. (195)
Vardaman
Cash has a broken leg. He has had two broken legs. (195)
Vardaman
My mother is not in the box. My mother does not smell like that. My mother is a fish. (196)
Moseley
I happened to look up, and saw her outside the window, looking in. (198)
Moseley
She kind of bumbled at the screen door a minute, like they do, and came in. (198)
Moseley
She was looking at me, hard, holding the package; I saw she had about as black a pair of eyes as ever I saw, and she was a stranger. (199)
Moseley
It was her eyes: kind of dumb and hopefully and sullenly willing to be disappointed all at the same time. (200)
Moseley
But then, in the eyes all of them look like they had no age and knew everything in the world, anyhow. (201)
Moseley
And then, life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die. (203)
Moseley
He was a kind of tall, gaunted man sitting on the wagon, saying it was a public street and he reckoned he had as much right there as anybody, and the marshal telling him he would have to move on; folks couldn't stand it. (203)
Darl
How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls. (207)
Darl
If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. (208)
Darl
I mix the cement in the can, stirring the slow water into the pale green thick coils. (207)
Darl
He is coming up the road behind us, wooden-backed, wooden-faced, moving only from his hips down. (209)
Vardaman
The hill goes off into the sky. Then the sun comes up from behind the hill and the mules and the wagon and pa walk on the sun. (211)
Vardaman
In Jefferson it is red on the track behind the glass. The track goes shining round and round. (211)
Vardaman
Tonight I am going to see where they stay while we are in the barn. (211)
Darl
The breeze was setting up from the barn, so we put her under the apple tree, where the moonlight can dapple the apple tree upon the long slumbering flanks within which now and then she talks in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling. (21
Darl
Jewel, I say, Who was your father, Jewel? (213)
Vardaman
And I saw something Dewey Dell told me not to tell nobody. (215)
Vardaman
It is on the back porch, where we can see the barn, and the moon shines on half of the pallet and we will lie half in the white and half in the black, with the moonlight on our legs. (216)
Vardaman
We lie on the pallet, with our legs in the moon. (216)
Darl
For an instant longer he runs silver in the moonlight, then he springs out like a flat figure cut leanly from tin against an abrupt and soundless explosion as the whole loft of the barn takes fire at once, as though it had been stuffed with powder. (218-2
Darl
The sound of it has become quite peaceful now, like the sound of the river did. (221)
Darl
Without stopping it over ends and rears again, pauses, then crashes slowly forward and through the curtain. (222)
Vardaman
The barn was still red, but it wasn't a barn now. It was sunk down, and the red went swirling up. The barn went swirling up in little red pieces, against the sky and the stars so that the stars moved backward. (223)
Darl
High against it they hang in narrowing circles, like the smoke, with an outward semblance of form and purpose, but with no inference of motion, progress or retrograde. (227)
Darl
Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down. (227)
Darl
Instead he sets his foot on the turning hub of the rear wheel, one hand grasping the stanchion, and with the hub turning smoothly under his sole he lifts the other foot and squats there, staring straight ahead, motionless, lean, wooden-backed, as though c
Cash
It wasn't nothing else to do. It was either send him to Jackson, or have Gillespie sue us, because he knowed some way that Darl set fire to it. (232)
Cash
A fellow that's going to spend the rest of his life locked up, he ought to be let to have what pleasure he can have before he goes. (233)
Cash
Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint...It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it. (233)
Cash
But I thought more than once before we crossed the river and after, how it would be God's blessing if He did take her outen our hands and get shut of her in some clean way...(233)
Cash
Folks seem to get away from the olden right teaching that says to drive the nails down and trim the edges well always like it was for your own use and comfort you were making it. (234)
Cash
Sometimes I think that if a working man could see work as far ahead as a lazy man can see laziness. (236)
Cash
I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. (237)
Cash
He sat on the ground and us watching him, laughing and laughing. (238)
Peabody
I reckon a man in a tight might let Bill Varner patch him up like a damn mule, but I be damned if the man that'd let Anse Bundren treat him with raw cement aint got more spare legs than I have." (239)
MacGowan
One of them black eyed ones that look like she'd as soon put a knife in you as not if you two-timed her. (242)
MacGowan
Them country people. Half the time they don't know what they want, and the balance of the time they can't tell it to you. (243)
MacGowan
I never saw no ring. But like as not, they aint heard yet out there that they use rings. (244)
Vardaman
Darl went to Jackson. Lots of people didn't go to Jackson. Darl is my brother. My brother is going to Jackson. (250)
Vardaman
So we are going to have some bananas. (251)
Darl
They put him on the train, laughing, down the long care laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed. (253)
Darl
One of them had to ride backward because the state's money has a face to each backside and a backside to each face, and they are riding on the state's money which is incest. (254)
Dewey Dell
He took the money and went out. (257)
Cash
I don't know if a little music aint about the nicest thing a fellow can have. (259)
Cash
It made him look a foot taller, kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud too, and then we see her behind him, carrying the other grip--a kind of duck-shaped woman all dressed up, with them kind of hard looking pop eyes like she was daring ere a man
Cash
This world is not his world; this life his life. (261)
Cash
Meet Mrs Bundren," he says. (261)
Darl
Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton house can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own. (3)
Darl
Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single
Darl
Between the shadow spaces they are yellow as gold, like soft gold, bearing on their flanks in smooth undulations the marks of the adze lade: a good carpenter, Cash is. (4)
Darl
Addie Bundren could not want a better oe, a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort. (5)
Darl
I go into the house followed by the...Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. of the adze. (5)
Cora Tull
So I saved out the eggs and baked yesterday. The cakes turned out right well. (6)
Cora Tull
Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart. (7)
Cora Tull
It isn't like the cakes cost me anything, as Mr Tull himself realizes that the eggs I saved were over and beyond what we had engaged to sell, so it was like we had found the eggs or they had been given to us. (8)
Cora Tull
The Lord can see into the heart. If it is His will that some folks has different ideas of honesty from other folks, it is not my place to question His decree. (8)
Cora Tull
If we were deaf we could almost watch her face and hear him, see him. Her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the skin in white lines. (8)
Cora Tull
Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her. (8)
Cora Tull
Under the quilt she makes no more of a hump than a rail would, and the only way you can tell she is breathing is by the sound of the mattress shucks. (8)
Cora Tull
It's not everybody can eat their mistakes, I can tell him. (9)
Cora Tull
Eula watches him as he goes on and passes from sight again toward the back. Her hand rises and touches her beads lightly, and then her hair. When she finds me watching her, her eyes go blank. (9)
Darl
When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. (10)
Darl
Pa's feet are badly splayed, his toes framed and bent and warped, with no toenail at all on his little toes, from working so hard in the wet in homemade shoes when he was a boy. (11)
Darl
He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse. (13)
Jewel
It's because he stays out there, right under the window, hammering and sawing on that ******* box. Where she's got to see him. (14)
Jewel
I said Good God do you want to see her in it. It's like when he was a little boy and she says if she had some fertilizer she would try to raise from flowers and he taken the bread pan and brought it back from the barn full of dung. (14)
Jewel
If it had just ben me when Cash fell off of that church and if it had just been me when pa laid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the county coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what th
Jewel
It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill at their faces, picking them up and throwing them down the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet and not that ******* adze going One lick less. (15)
Jewel
Because I said If you wouldn't keep on sawing and nailing at it until a man can't sleep even and her hands laying on the quilt like two of them roots dug up and tried to wash and you couldn't get them clean. (15)
Darl
He was sick once from wiring int he sun when he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that if he ever sweats, he will die. I suppose he believes it. (17)
Darl
Since he lost his teeth his mouth collapses in slow repetition when he dips. The stubble gives his lower face that appearance that old dogs have. (17)
Darl
Jewel's eyes look like pale wood in his high-blooded face. He is a head taller than any of the rest of us, always was. (17)
Darl
He says it harshly, savagely, but does not say the word. Like a little boy in the dark to flail his courage and suddenly aghast in to silence by his own noise. (18)
Cora Tull
It was the sweetest thing I ever saw. It was like he knew he would never see her again, that Anse Bundren was driving him from his mother's death bed, never to see her in this world again. (21)
Cora Tull
I always said Darl was different from those others. I always said he was the only one of them that had his mother's nature, had any natural affection. Not that Jewel, the one she labored so to bear and coddled and petted so and him flinging into tantrums
Cora Tull
A Bundren through and through, loving nobody, caring for nothing except how to get something with the least amount of work. (22)
Cora Tull
I knew she was partial to him, to the same quality in him that let her put up with Anse Bundren when Mr Tull said she ought to poisoned him---for three dollars, denying his dying mother the goodbye kiss. (22)
Cora Tull
But thank God it will be the faces of my loved kin, my blood and flesh, for in my husband and children I have been more blessed than most, trials though they have been at times. (22)
Cora Tull
She lived, a lonely woman, lonely with her pride, trying to makes folks believe different, hiding the fact that they just suffered her, because she was not cold in the coffin before they were carting her forty miles away to bury her, flouting the will of
Cora Tull
I have tried to live right in the sight of God and man, for the honor and comfort of my Christian husband and the love and respect of my Christian children. (23)
Cora Tull
Sometimes I lose faith in human nature for a time; I am assailed by doubt. But always the Lord restores my faith and reveals to me His bounteous love for His creatures. (24)
Dewey Dell
I said if it don't mean for me to do it the sack will not be full and I will turn up the next row but if the sack is full, I cannot help it...And we picked on toward the secret shade and our eyes would drown together touching on his hands and my hands and
Dewey Dell
He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without words, and I knew he knew because if he had said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been there and saw us. But he said he did know and I said "Are
Vernon Tull
His folks buries at New Hope, too, not three miles away. But it's just like him to
marry a woman born a day's hard ride away and have her die on him. (30)
Vernon Tull
It's a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. (30)
Vernon Tull
I mind my mammy lived to be seventy and more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night gown she had had forty-five years
Vernon Tull
Anse's wrists dangle out of his sleeves: I never see him with a shirt on that looked like it was his in all my life. They all looked like Jewel might have give him his old ones. (32)
Vernon Tull
He puts his shoes on, stomping into them, like he does everything, like he is hoping all the time he really cant do it and can quit trying to. (32)
Vernon Tull
I tell him again I will help him out if he gets into a tight, with her sick and all. Like most folks around here, I done holp him so much already I cant quit now. (33)
Pa/Anse
I told Addie it want any luck living on a road when it come by here, and she said, for the world like a woman, "Get up and move, then." But I told her it want no luck in it, because the Lord put roads for traveling: why He laid them down flat on the earth
Pa/Anse
I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is my heart: I know it is. I have done things but neither better nor worse than them that pretend otherlike, and I know that Old Marster will care for me as for ere a sparrow that falls. (38)
Darl
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end. (39)
Darl
Jewel," I say, "do you know that Addie Bundren is going to die? Addie Bundren is going to die?" (40)
Peabody
When Anse finally sent for me of his own accord, I said "He has wore her out at
last." And I said a damn good thing, and at first I would not go because there
might be something I could do and I would have to haul her back, by God. (41)
Peabody
I thought maybe they have the same sort of fool ethics in heaven they have in the
Medical College and that it was maybe Vernon Tull sending for me again, getting
me there in the nick of time, as Vernon always does things, getting the most for
Anse's money
Peabody
Anse has not been in town in twelve years. And how his mother ever got up there to bear him, he being his mother's son. (42)
Peabody
I'll be damned if I can see why I dont quit. A man seventy years old, weighing two hundred and odd pounds, being hauled up and down a damn mountain on a rope. (43)
Peabody
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. (43-44)
Peabody
I have seen it before in women. Seen them drive from the room them coming with sympathy and pity, with actual help, and clinging to some trifling animal to whom they never were more than pack-horses. (45)
Peabody
That's what they mean by the love that passeth understanding: that pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us, carry with us into operating rooms, carry stubbornly and furiously with us into the earth again. (45-4
Darl
He looks up at the gaunt face framed by the window in the twilight. It is a composite picture of all time since he was a child. (48)
Darl
She looks at Vardaman; her eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the
two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as though someone had
leaned down and blown upon them. (48)
Darl
From behind pa's leg Vardaman peers, his mouth full open and all color draining from his face into his mouth, as though he has by some means fleshed his own teeth in himself, sucking. (49)
Darl
Pa leans above the bed in the twilight, his humped silhouette partaking of that owl-like quality of awry-feathered, disgruntled outrage within which lurks a wisdom too profound or too inert for even thought. (49)
Darl
The sound of the saw is steady, competent, unhurried, stirring the dying
light so that at each stroke her face seems to wake a little into an expression of listening and of waiting, as though she were counting the strokes. (50)
Darl
I am I and you are you and I know it and you dont know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me and Darl (51)
Darl
Pa breathes with a quiet, rasping sound, mouthing the snuff against his gums. "God's will be done," he says. "Now I can get them teeth." (52)
Darl
Jewel, I say, she is dead, Jewel. Addie Bundren is dead (52)
Vardaman
I can hear the bed and her face and them and I can feel the floor shake when he walks on it that came and did it. That came and did it when she was all right but he came and did it. (54)
Vardaman
Cooked and et. Cooked and et." (57)
Dewey Dell
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. (58)
Darl
He takes up the saw again; again it moves up and down, in and out of that unhurried imperviousness as a piston moves in the oil; soaked, scrawny, tireless, with the lean light body of a boy or an old man. (77)
Dewey Dell
But I know it is there because God gave women a sign when something has happened bad. (58)
Dewey Dell
It's because I am alone. If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. (59)
Vardaman
I got shut up in the crib the new door it was too heavy for me it went shut I couldn't breathe because the rat was breathing up all the air. (65)
Vardaman
God made me. I did not said to God to made me in the country. If He can make the train, why cant He make them all in the town because flour and sugar and coffee. (66)
Vardaman
Are you going to nail her up in it, Cash? (65)
Vernon Tull
When folks wants a fellow, it's best to wait till they sends for him, I've found. (69)
Vernon Tull
He looked like a drownded puppy, in them overalls, without no hat, splashed up to his knees where he had walked them four miles in the mud. (69)
Vernon Tull
I be durn if it didn't give me the creeps, even when I didn't know yet. (70)
Vernon Tull
Now and then a fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning. (71)
Vernon Tull
For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it wont stand a whole lot of racking. (71)
Vernon Tull
And the next morning they found him in his shirt tail, laying asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top of the box bored clean full of holes and Cash's new auger broke off in the last one. When they taken the lid off they found that two of them
Vernon Tull
It aint right. I be durn if it is. Because He said Suffer little children to come unto Me don't make it right, neither. (73)
Vernon Tull
I reckon if there's ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. (74)
Darl
It is light, yet they move slowly; empty, yet they carry it carefully; lifeless, yet they move with hushed precautionary words to one another, speaking of it as though, complete, it now slumbered lightly alive, waiting to come awake. (80)
Darl
In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. (80)
Darl
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home. (81)
Cash
I made it on the bevel. (82)
Vardaman
My mother is a fish. (84)
Vernon Tull
They had laid her in it reversed. (88)
Vernon Tull
If it takes wet boards for folks to fall, it's fixing to be lots of falling before this spell is done. (90)
Vernon Tull
Whitfield begins. His voice is bigger than him. It's like they are not the same. (91)
Vernon Tull
In the thick air it's like their voices come out of the air, flowing together and on in the sad, comforting tunes. (91)
Darl
I cannot love my mother because I have no mother. Jewel's mother is a horse. (95)
Darl
In his face the blood goes in waves. In between them his flesh is greenish looking, about that smooth, thick, pale green of cow's cud; his face suffocated, furious, his lip lifted upon his teeth. (97)
Pa/Anse
I told him not to bring that horse out of respect for his dead ma, because it wouldn't look right, him prancing along on a durn circus animal and her wanting us all to be in the wagon with her that sprung from her flesh and blood, but we hadn't no more th
Darl
We go on, with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it. (108)
Pa/Anse
Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit. (110)
Pa/Anse
Every man will be equal there and it will be taken from them that have and give to them that have not by the Lord. (110)
Pa/Anse
I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He don't take some curious ways to show it, seem like. (111)
Samson
I aint much for meddling. Let every man run his own business to suit himself, I say. (114)
Samson
I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and stopping. (114)
Samson
If her eyes had been pistols, I wouldn't be talking now. (115)
Samson
Because I got just as much respect for the dead as ere a man, but you've got to respect the dead themselves, and a woman that's been dead in a box four days, the best way to respect her is to get her into the ground as quick as you can. (116)
Samson
A man can't tell nothing about them. I lived with the sam one fifteen years and I be durn if I can. (117)
Samson
I can't think of his name: Rafe's twin; that one it was. (112)
Dewey Dell
I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. (120)
Dewey Dell
That's what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events (121)
Dewey Dell
I rose and took the knife from the streaming fish still hissing and I killed Darl. (121)
Dewey Dell
There may be something from her nightmare on pg 121.
Dewey Dell
I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God. (122)
Vernon Tull
He was looking at it like he had believed all the time that folks had been lying to him about it being gone, but like he was hoping all the time it really was. (123)
Vernon Tull
He looks at me. He don't say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk...Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes. (125)
Vernon Tull
My mule aint going into that water." (127)