As I Lay Dying

by William Faulkner

inventing devilment to devil her until I would have frailed him time and time.

reward I will be surrounded by loving faces, carrying the farewell kiss of each of my loved ones into my reward.

dust like it was ashamed of being dead,

an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.

there wouldn’t ever be a worry about this country being deforested someday.

That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

Cash’s saw snores steadily into the board.

whispering the useless air.

He is a big tub of guts and I am a little tub of guts and if there is not any room for anything else important in a big tub of guts, how can it be room in a little tub of guts.

The dead air shapes the dead earth in the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

I think that if

nothing but being married will help a man, he’s durn nigh hopeless.

Lord had to create women is because man dont know his own go...

Below the sky sheet-lightning slumbers lightly; against it the trees, motionless, are ruffled out to the last twig, swollen, increased as though quick with young.

The first harsh, sparse, swift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense.

They are big as buckshot, warm as though fired from a gun; they sweep across the lant...

“I dont begrudge her the wetting,”

aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping.

you and him and all the men in the world that torture us alive and flout us dead, dragging us up and down the country——”

It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside. But now it was like we had all—and by a kind of telepathic agreement of admitted fear—flung the whole thing back like covers on the bed and we all sitting bolt upright in our nakedness, staring at one another and saying “Now is the truth. He

Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which are the horizons and the valleys of the earth.

“My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin”

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

knew that living was terrible

and that this was the answer to it.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what t...

never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

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.

The breeze was setting up from the barn, so we put her under the apple tree, where the moonlight can dapple the apple tree upon the long slumbering flanks within which now and then she talks in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling.