The Sound And The Fury Quotes
"Approach language, words: not with seriousness, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite."
"The arrowing buildings rise out of it and because of it, to be torn down and arrow again."
"Art, to become visible at all, must become a ceremony, a spectacle."
"Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript."
"That cold intellect which can write with calm and complete detachment and gusto of its contemporary scene is not among us."
"I wasn't crying, and I tried to stop, watching the girls coming along in the twilight."
"I could hear the clock, and I could hear Caddy standing behind me, and I could hear the roof."
"I could hear the clock and the roof and Caddy."
"A name ain't going to help him. Hurt him, neither. Folks don't have no luck, changing names."
"You must be quiet now, Jason. She said. We tiptoed."
"She's sick. You can sleep with her when she gets well."
"You've been running a long time, not to've got any further off than mealtime."
"You aint had to be out in the rain like I is. You's born lucky and dont know it."
"I wish it wouldn't rain. You can't do anything."
"Name ain't going to help him. Hurt him, neither."
"I could still hear the clock between my voice."
"You go on back upstairs and lay down. It'll quit smarting him in a minute now, and he'll hush."
"He needs to be sent to Jackson, Quentin said. How can anybody live in a house like this."
"I'm going to, Quentin said. Don't you worry."
"Hush your mouth, Jason, Dilsey said. She went and put her arm around Quentin. Sit down, honey."
"He already had twice as much as me. Ask him if he ain't."
"What you howling for now. Cant you set and look at the fire and be quiet."
"I was just trying to get him to hush up and not sturb Miss Cahline."
"What's the matter now, Jason said. He just trying hisself."
"Hush, now. You dont want to make your maw sick again, does you."
"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience."
"Because no battle is ever won. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
"You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear."
"Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity."
"I'll have to stay in the house a little longer that's all and my jaw-muscles getting numb and my mouth saying Wait Wait just a minute through the sweat ah ah ah behind my teeth."
"Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune."
"It's nature is hurting you not Caddy and I said That's just words and he said So is virginity and I said you dont know. You cant know and he said Yes."
"The sound of the bees diminished, sustained yet, as though instead of sinking into silence, silence merely increased between us, as water rises."
"Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar."
"I didn't let him I made him watching me getting mad What do you think of that? Red print of my hand coming up through her face like turning a light on under your hand her eyes going bright."
"You may think you can run over me like you do your grandmother and everybody else, but you'll find out different."
"When people act like niggers, no matter who they are the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger."
"I'm sorry now," she says. "I dont see why I was ever born."
"I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I dont care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are."
"Aint nobody works much in dis country cep de boll-weevil, noways."
"Boll-weevil got tough time. Work ev'y day in de week out in de hot sun, rain er shine."
"You are opening my letters to her. I know that as well as if I were looking at you."
"What this country needs is white labor. Let these dam trifling niggers starve for a couple of years, then they'd see what a soft thing they have."
"Cotton is a speculator's crop. They fill the farmer full of hot air and get him to raise a big crop for them to whipsaw on the market, to trim the suckers with."
"I give every man his due, regardless of religion or anything else. I have nothing against jews as an individual."
"Money has no value; it's just the way you spend it. It dont belong to anybody, so why try to hoard it."
"I make it a rule never to keep a scrap of paper bearing a woman's hand, and I never write them at all."
"Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw."
"You'd better take that good one. How do you fellows ever expect to get ahead, trying to work with cheap equipment?"
"I can stand on my own feet; I dont need any man's mahogany desk to prop me up."
"I reckon she does. Last time I gave her forty dollars. Gave it to her."
"You're the doctor. But dont come complaining to me next year when you have to buy a new outfit."
"If you've got blood like that in you, you'll do anything."
"A good woman misses a lot she's better off without knowing."
"Sometimes I think what's the use of anything."
"A man that can live as long as I have and not know when to quit is a fool."
"You made me. I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead."
"I just want an even chance to get my money back."
"It's his fault. He wont let me alone, and I have to."
"I've seen the first and the last. Never you mind me."
"I've known the Lord to use stranger tools than that."
"The Lord don't care whether he's bright or not. Don't nobody but white trash care about that."
"I've seen the beginning, and now I see the ending."
"You bound for the chain gang, but I'll send you there before the chain gang ready for you."
"We ain't down to worse'n this, ef folks jes knowed."
"You're the Lord's child anyway. And I be His'n too, fo long, praise Jesus."
"Never you mind. I've seen the first and the last."
"He still had the claymore even when on his homemade wooden leg he finally overtook his father and son four years later."
"Succeeded at last in risking not only his neck but the security of his family and the very integrity of the name he would leave behind him."
"Fled by night, running true to family tradition, with his son and the old claymore and the tartan."
"Who loved not his sister's body but some concept of Compson honor precariously and (he knew well) only temporarily supported by the minute fragile membrane of her maidenhead."
"Who loved not the idea of the incest which he would not commit, but some presbyterian concept of its eternal punishment."
"Who loved death above all, who loved only death, loved and lived in a deliberate and almost perverted anticipation of death."
"Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it."
"Logical rational contained and even a philosopher in the old stoic tradition."
"Who, all the money from the sale of the pasture having gone for his sister's wedding and his brother's course at Harvard, used his own niggard savings."