As I Lay Dying Quotes - Page 2 | Just Great DataBase

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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.

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It surged up out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that surging and heaving desolation like Christ.

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It's Cash and Jewel and Varadaman and Dewey Del', pa says kind of hangdog and proud too, with this teeth and all, even if he wouldn't look at us. 'Meet Mrs Bundren', he says.

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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.

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Only her eyes seem to move. It's like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been there.

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My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin.

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it's better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. I dont know what I am. I dont know if I am or not.

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I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora’s a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else.

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It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

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It was her wedding dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had laid her head to foot in it so the dress could spread out, and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn’t show.

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. . . I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at.

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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. And I reckon they would be for man’s good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.

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At night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. 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.

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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.

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I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at

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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.

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Está oscuro. Oigo el bosque, el silencio: los conozco bien. Pero ningún sonido vivo; ni siquiera a él. Era como si la oscuridad lo sacara de su integridad convirtiéndose en una dispersión inconexa de elementos: mucosidades y pataleos, olor a carne tibia y pelo apestando a amoniaco; una ilusión de un conjunto coordinado de piel con manchas y huesos poderosos dentro de la cual, disperso y secreto y familiar, hay un ser diferente de mi ser. Le veo disolverse - las patas, un ojo muy abierto, manchas alegres como llamas frías - y flotar en la oscuridad en solución que se desvanece; todo uno y sin embargo ninguno; todos los dos pero ninguno. Veo con el oído que se enrosca hacia él, le acaricia, le da su forma definitiva: cernejas, lomo, brazuelo y cabeza. Olor y sonido. No estoy asustado.

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vomiting the crying

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Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.

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I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.

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It's like some folks has the smooth, pretty boards to build a courthouse with and others dont have no more than rough lumber fitten to build a chicken coop. But's it's better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse...

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I reckon a man in a tight might let Bill Varner patch him up like a 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.

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She has had a hard life, but so does every woman.

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But I aint so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

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And then he died. He did not know he was dead.

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It was that boy. I said Here; you better take a holt of my hand and he waited and held to me. I be durn if it wasn’t like he come back and got me; like he was saying They wont 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, and if I just stayed with him I’d be all right too. When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring: you’ve got to have a tight jar or you’ll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that wont, because you are a man. And

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He is the greatest artist the South has produced.… Indeed, through his many novels and short stories, Faulkner fights out the moral problem which was repressed after the nineteenth century [yet] for all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics. —RALPH ELLISON Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being. —JOHN STEINBECK For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner’s works] are without equal in our time and country. —ROBERT PENN WARREN No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there. —EUDORA WELTY

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As with any great literature, there are probably as many ways to read William Faulkner’s writing as there are readers. There are hundreds of books devoted to interpretations of his novels, numerous biographies, and every year high school teachers and college professors guide their students through one or more of the novels. But after all is said and done, there are the books themselves, and the pleasure of reading them can be deep and lasting. The language Faulkner uses ranges from the poetically beautiful, nearly biblical to the coarse sounds of rough dialect. His characters linger in the mind, whether for their heroism or villainy, their stoicism or self-indulgence, their honesty or deceitfulness or self-deception, their wisdom or stupidity, their gentleness or cruelty. In short, like Shakespeare, William Faulkner understood what it means to be human.

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I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like. But

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He says it harshly, savagely, but he does not say the word. Like a little boy in the dark to flail his courage and suddenly aghast into silence by his own noise.

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And so if Cash nails the box up, she is not a rabbit.

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Then it wasn't and she was, and now it is and she wasn't.

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If ever was such a misfortunate man, pa says.

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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 for pride or fear. Cash

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Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. But he dont like to admit it to them until they have beards.

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Cash aimed to buy that talking machine from Suratt with that money, Darl said.

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The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now.

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Sometimes I aint so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. 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. Because

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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.

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He is looking down at her peaceful, rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf.

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... a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.

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Sometimes I aint so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. 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.

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When I look back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring: you've got to have a tight jar or you'll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that wont, because you are a man.

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Meet Mrs. Bundren, he says.

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It’s like some folks has the smooth, pretty boards to build a courthouse with and others dont have no more than rough lumber fitten to build a chicken coop. But it’s better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse, and when they both build shoddy or build well, neither because it’s one or tother is going to make a man feel the better nor the worse.

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and Judith, the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness.

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