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41 " Then the town was sorry with being glad, as people sometimes are sorry for those whom they have at last forced to do as they wanted them to. "
― William Faulkner , Light in August
42 " She has no mother because fatherblood hates with love and pride, but motherblood with hate loves and cohabits. "
43 " He turned the pages in steady progression, though now and then he would seem to linger upon one page, one line, perhaps one word. He would not look up then. He would not move, apparently arrested and held immobile by a single word which had perhaps not yet impacted, his whole being suspended by the single trivial combination of letters in quiet and sunny space, so that hanging motionless and without physical weight he seemed to watch the slow flowing of time beneath him, thinking All I wanted was peace thinking, "
44 " They have thundered past now and crashed silently on into the dusk; night has finally come. Yet he still sits at the study window, the street lamp at the corner flickers and glares, so that the bitter shadows of the unwinded maples seem to toss faintly upon the August darkness. "
45 " He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speed were not necessary. "
46 " Mrs Armstid does not rattle the stove now, though her back is still toward the younger woman. Then she turns. They look at one another, suddenly naked, watching one another; the young woman in the chair, with her neat hair and her inert hands upon her lap, and the older one beside the stove, turning motionless too, with a savage screw of gray hair at the base of her skull, and a face that might have been carved in sandstone. Then the younger one speaks. "
47 " She [Mrs. Hines] stood before the door as if she were barring them from the house--a dumpy, fat little woman with a round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair. "
48 " The woman went on. She had not looked back. She went out of sight up the road: swollen, slow, deliberate, unhurried, and tireless as augmenting afternoon itself. She walked out of their talking too; perhaps out of their minds too. "
49 " 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. "
50 " When his knock gets no response, Byron leaves the porch and goes around the house and enters the small, enclosed back yard. He sees the chair at once beneath the mulberry tree. It is a canvas deck chair, mended and faded and sagged so long to the shape of Hightower’s body that even when empty it seems to hold still in ghostly embrace the owner’s obese shapelessness; approaching, Byron thinks how the mute chair evocative of disuse and supineness and shabby remoteness from the world, is somehow the symbol and the being too of the man himself. "
51 " He turned doctor. One of his first patients was his wife. Possibly he kept her alive. At least, he enabled her to produce life, though he was fifty and she past forty when the son was born. That son grew to manhood among phantoms, and side by side with a ghost. "
52 " What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. That was it: cool; he was thinking, saying aloud to himself sometimes, “I better move. I better get away from here.”But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia. "
53 " He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. "
54 " But I can try it. I can try to do it. "
55 " 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. "
56 " All right. It is so, then. But not to me. Not in my life and my love. "
57 " They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence. "
58 " It was hot; heat quivered up from the asphalt, giving to the familiar buildings about the square a nimbus quality, a quality of living and palpitant chiaroscuro. "
59 " It was that his words, his telling, just did not synchronize with what his hearers believed would (and must) be the scope of a single individual. "
60 " Folks are funny. They can't stick to one way of thinking or doing anything unless they get a new reason for doing it ever so often. "