Absalom, Absalom! Quotes
"Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish."
"It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen."
"'Because you are going away to attend the college at Harvard they tell me,' Miss Coldfield said."
"'Yessum,' Quentin said. Only she don't mean that, he thought."
"He was a barracks filled with stubborn backlooking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease."
"The twilight was full of it and of the smell of his father's cigar."
"So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?"
"He was riding the roan horse, in the frock coat and the beaver hat."
"Yes, a still hot quiet Sunday afternoon like this afternoon."
"The aunt spent all the next day going from house to house."
"Ellen of course was not aware of this, anymore than the aunt herself was."
"He did not forget that night, even though Ellen, I think, did."
"She (Miss Rosa) was born in 1845, with her sister already seven years married and the mother of two children and Miss Rosa born into her parents' middle age."
"But she was born, at the price of her mother's life and was never to be permitted to forget it."
"Perhaps she saw in her father's death, in the resulting necessity upon her as an orphan and a pauper, to turn to her next of kin for food and shelter and protection."
"Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest."
"He trusted no man nor woman, who had no man's nor woman's love, since Ellen was incapable of love and Judith was too much like him."
"Yes, I can imagine how Bon led up to it, to the shock: the skill, the calculation, preparing Henry's puritan mind as he would have prepared a cramped and rocky field and planted it and raised the crop which he wanted."
"Because he loved Bon. I can imagine him and Sutpen in the library that Christmas eve, the father and the brother, percussion and repercussion like a thunderclap and its echo."
"This grim humorless yokel out of a granite heritage where even the houses, let alone clothing and conduct, are built in the image of a jealous and sadistic Jehovah."
"The same hunting and riding; the same parties: the identical music from identical instruments, crude fiddles and guitars, now in the big house with candles and silk dresses and champagne, now in dirt-floored cabins."
"It was as if he found the whole business, not inexplicable of course, just unnecessary; that he knew at once that the occasion would arise when he would have to wait and that all he would need to do would be to wait."
"This is only the foundation. This belongs to anybody."
"I will believe! I will! I will! whether it is true or not, I will believe!"
"The customary way is to stand back to back, the pistol in your right hand and the corner of the other cloak in your left."
"God may mark every sparrow, but we do not pretend to be God, you see."
"There must have been some seed he left, to cause a child's vacant fairy-tale to come alive in that garden."
"There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse."
"It's not the blow we suffer from but the tedious repercussive anticlimax of it."
"There was that ceremony. Bon knew that that would be what Henry would resist."
"That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel."
"There is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for."
"Because I never saw him. I never even saw him dead."
"It was too short, too fast, too quick; six hours of a summer afternoon saw it all."
"That was how we lived for seven months. And then one afternoon in January Thomas Sutpen came home."
"I hold no brief for myself who could give you a thousand specious reasons good enough for women."
"It was the summer after that first Christmas that Henry brought him home."
"It did not even require the first day of the life we were to lead together to show us that we did not need him."
"But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too."
"Yes, there should, there must, be love and faith: these left with us by fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers."
"Something ate with us; we talked to it and it answered questions; it sat with us before the fire at night and talked, not to us, but to the air."
"He was absent only from the room, and that because he had to be elsewhere, a part of him encompassing each ruined field and fallen fence and crumbling wall."
"His was that cold alert fury of the gambler who knows that he may lose anyway but that with a second's flagging of the fierce constant will he is sure to."
"I watched the miragy antics of men and women—called honor, principle, marriage, love, bereavement, death."
"It was not love; I do not say that, not gentleness or pity: just a sudden over-burst of light, illumination."
"He was gone; I did not even know that either since there is a metabolism of the spirit as well as of the entrails."
"I hold no brief for myself, I do not excuse it. I could have said that he had needed, used me; why should I rebel now, because he would use me more?"
"He did not pause, did not take that day or two to let the bones and flesh of fifty-nine recuperate."
"Rosa Coldfield, lose him, weep him; found a man but failed to keep him."
"I had not lost him because I never owned him: a certain segment of rotten mud walked into my life, spoke that to me which I had never heard before and then walked out."
"Because there was love Mr Compson said There was that letter she brought and gave to your grandmother to keep."
"I believed that there were things which still mattered just because they had mattered once. But I was wrong. Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive."
"That was how I learned of the West Indies. Not where they were, though if I had known at the time that that knowledge would someday serve me, I would have learned that too."
"I found that she was not and could never be, through no fault of her own, adjunctive or incremental to the design which I had in mind, so I provided for her and put her aside."
"I remember how I remained one afternoon when school was out and waited for the teacher, waylaid him."
"He just put the musket down and had someone unbar the door and then bar it behind him, and walked out into the darkness and subdued them."
"It was like that, he said, like an explosion—a bright glare that vanished and left nothing, no ashes nor refuse."
"All the men who had started the race yesterday had come back except three."
"Grandfather said probably another Frenchman could not have understood all of it."
"The eyes desperate and hopeless but indomitable too, invincible too, not beaten yet by a damn sight."
"Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks."
"It doesn't matter: that pebble's watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too."
"Maybe we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve."
"That pebble's watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space."
"He did not demand; I accepted them at their own valuation."
"What need has a fellow like Wash Jones to question or doubt the man that General Lee himself said in a hand-wrote ticket that he was brave?"
"All boy flesh that walked and breathed stemming from that one ambiguous eluded dark fatherhead."
"That was why it did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing."
"And maybe it was that same night or maybe a night a week later while they were stopped, with the fires burning for warmth at least because at least warmth is cheap and doesn't remain consumed."
"You don't waste a war—think how they must have talked, how Henry would say, 'But must you marry her? Do you have to do it?'"
"I will accept either an apology or a bullet, as you prefer."
"I am out in front of you a lot now; going into battle, charging, I will be out in front of you."
"Because he never had to worry about the love because that would take care of itself."
"They were still walking backward, slow and stubborn, listening toward the North for the end of it."
"It was not Bon, it was Henry; Bon that found Henry at last and stooped to pick him up and Henry fought back, struggled."
"Then for the second time he looked at the expressionless and rocklike face, at the pale boring eyes in which there was no flicker, nothing."
"Not God; evidently we have done without Him for four years, only He just didn't think to notify us."
"That was all he had to do, now, today; four years ago or at any time during the four years."
"I would have said, I will never see her again before he could have asked it of me."
"No I'm not. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister."
"It was because he said to himself, 'If Henry don't mean what he said, it will be all right.'"
"I didn't know there were ten in Mississippi that went to school at one time."
"We don't live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves."
"You cant understand it. You would have to be born there."
"We will probably need it to get into the house, anyway."
"I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died."
"The South. Jesus. No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves."