As I Lay Dying - Faulkner

Please ignore the bad grammar/spelling. It is written that way. If you have a problem with the lack of apostrophes, take it up with Faulkner.

• "She ought to taken them," Kate says. "But those rich town ladies can change their minds. poor folks can't."

• It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older. Then I would wait until they all went to sleep so I could lie with my shirt-tail up hearing them asleep, feeling myself with out touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing upon my parts and wondering if Cash was yonder in the darkness doing it too, had been doing it perhaps for the last two years before I could have wanted to or could have.

• 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. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

• Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent, shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

• I said You dont know what worry is. I dont know what it is. I dont know wheter I am worrying or not. Wheter I can or not. I dont know wheter I can cry or not. I dont know wheter I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

• How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

• That was when I learned tht words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fewar was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

• 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 pride or fear. Cash didn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn't matter.

• My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle.

• 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.