I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain’s surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized
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. And when I would have to look at them day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.
But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it. He was there."Jewel's mother is a horse," Darl said."Then mine can be a fish, can't it, Darl? I said.Jewel is my brother."Then mine will have to be a horse, too," I said."Why? Darl said. "If pa is your pa, why does your ma have to be a horse just because Jewel's is?""Why does it? I said. "Why does it, Darl?"Darl is my brother."Then what is your ma, Darl?" I said."I haven't got ere one," Darl said. "Because If I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it can't be is. Can't it?""No," I said."Then I am not," Darl said. "Am I?""No," I said.I am. Darl is my brother."But you are, Darl," I said."I know it," Darl said. "That's why I am not is. Are is too many for one woman to foal.
The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. Yet they appear dwarfed. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. 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. The mules stand, their fore quarters already sloped a little, their rumps high. They too are breathing now with a deep groaning sound; looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and despairing quality as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see.