Oh, he said. I see. But he did not see, exactly, though he believed that he could have been wrong and that she was right. And so a year later she talked to him suddenly of marriage and escape in the same words, he was not surprised, not hurt. He just thought quietly, ‘So this is love. I see. I was wrong about it too’, thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.
...probably by that time he had learned that there were three things and no more: breathing, pleasure, darkness; and without money there could be no pleasure, and without pleasure it would not even be breathing but mere protoplasmic inhale and collapse of blind unorganism in a darkness where light never began.
Quentin did not answer, staring at the window; then he could not tell if it was the actual window or the window's pale rectangle upon his eyelids, though after a moment it began to emerge. It began to take shape in its same curious, light, gravity-defying attitude--the once-folded sheet out of the wistaria Mississippi summer, the cigar smell, the random blowing of the fireflies. "The South," Shreve said. "The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years." It was becoming quite distinct. He would be able to decipher the words soon, in a moment; even almost now, now, now."I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died," Quentin said.
CashI made it on the bevel.1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest upand down or straight across.4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time. So the seams andjoints are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and-down.5. In a bed where people lie down all the time, the joints and seams aremade sideways, because the stress is sideways.6. Except.7. A body is not square like a crosstie.8. Animal magnetism.9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, sothe seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.10. You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel.11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the center, the stress being up-and-down.12. So I made it on the bevel.13. It makes a neater job.
and the very old men--some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.
From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn) of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask. The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south again as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long.