Absalom Absalom Quotes

“battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say 'Go there' conferred upon them by an absolute caste system”
― William Faulkner

“When she ((Ellen)) shopped (there were twenty stores in Jefferson now)she unbent without even getting out of the carriage, gracious and assures and talking the most complete nonsense, voluble, speaking her bring set meaningless phrases out of the part which she had written for herself, of the duchess peripatetic with property soups and medicines among a soilless and uncompelled peasantry - a woman who, if she had the fortitude to bear sorrow and trouble, might have rise to actual stardom in the role of the matriarch arbitrating from the fireside corner of a crone the pride and destiny of her family, instead of turning at the last to the youngest member of it and asking her to protect the others.”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“I will tell you what he did and let you be the judge. (Or try to tell you, because there are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less, and this is one of them. It can be told; I could take that many sentences, repeat the bold blank naked and outrageous words just as he spoke them, and bequeath you only that same aghast and outraged unbelief I knew when I comprehended what he meant; or take three thousand sentences and leave you only that Why? Why? and Why? that I have asked and listened to for almost fifty years.) But I will let you be the judge and let you tell me if I was right.”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“looking out upon the whatever ogreworld of that quiet village street with the air of children born too late into their parents' lives and doomed to contemplate all human behavior through the complex and needless follies of adults”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“each look burdened with youth's immemorial obsession not with time's dragging weight which the old live with but with its fluidity: the bright heels of all the lost moments of fifteen and sixteen.”
― William Faulkner

“I read a quote from Absalom, Absalom! It's a reference to some of the plants that have already lost their blooms: "...and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers, but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard, tight sticky buds... on Judas trees and beech and maple...you find that you have been wanting that pretty hard for some time..."
In his story Faulkner may have been suggesting a lustful want for the maiden Judith Sutpen, but I take it another direction. As hard as Mississippi can be, I realize now I have indeed been wanting that pretty hard for some time.
If only I had known to avoid the wisteria. Instead, I said no when I should have said yes; said yes when I should have said no---and that mistake has nearly choked the life from me.”
― Julie Cantrell, Perennials