Selected Short Stories

by William Faulkner

talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

There was no movement, no sound, not even an insect. The dark world seemed to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars.

You know how it is. Like there is a right time for everything. Like nobody is anything in himself: like a woman, even when you love her, is a woman to you just a part of the time and the rest of the time she is just a person that don’t look at things the same way a man has learned to.

Because I loved her, you see. Nothing can marry two people closer than a mutual sin in the world’s eyes. And he had had his chance. If it had been me that knew her first and married her and he had been me, I would have had my chance.