Little Sister Death Quotes

“He was seized with longing so intense it ached in his chest, he wanted it always to keep, to drag out secretly and study it like a yellowed photograph, and he thought I am home, this is me, this is where I have been rambling down to all these years.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“Binder, in his youth, had always been interested in the supernatural, had felt some deep and nameless affinity for the questions that did not have any answers.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“Two, it seemed, could not live nearly as cheaply as one, especially if that one had been accustomed to subsisting on whatever fell to hand, spending what little money he did have in secondhand bookstores.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“Her hips moved against his thigh and he wondered what she was dreaming. He smiled wryly into the darkness. Your mind is as cold as a cat’s heart, but your body didn’t get the news.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“Jung called it synchronicity, and after Binder read Jung’s book he was wont to call it synchronicity too. He was fascinated as well by the little incidents in life that appear wearing masks, disguised as other incidents; years later their significance surfaces, and sometimes you remember, with a sense of déjà vu, the keystone event that triggered the sequence. More often you don’t.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“the history of any family is a history of death and misfortune.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“Hunkered there in the darkness, he felt before himself a door, madness already raising the hand to knock.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“He was used to shotgun shacks with cracks you could have thrown a good-sized housecat through and floors through whose cracks a man could watch his chickens scratching for worms, if he was lucky enough to possess any chickens.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“They were in a sylvan wilderness, a place that seemed never to have known human habitation.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“And Hunger and Pain drew subtly nearer, and there in the water was one all young and white, and with long shining hair like a column of fair sunny water…. And the tree covered with leaves of a thousand different colors spoke and all the leaves whirled up into the air and spun about it; and the tree was an old man with a shining white beard like a silver cuirass, and the leaves were birds. What sayest thou, good Saint Francis? “Little sister Death, “said the good Saint Francis.—William Faulkner, Mayday”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“The cornfield seemed darker toward its center. Light entered at the rows’ end, ran like liquid down the middles, getting shallower and shallower. There seemed at the convergence of the rows some mass of shadows light could not defray.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“Binder didn’t plan on being disappointed either. He felt a growing obsession to unstring the secrets the house held, to unravel the Gordian knot time and myth had only tightened.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“Today she had felt like a child forced to play grownup in a cavernous nineteenth-century house with someone else’s furniture, someone else’s past. Though not forced, she thought hastily. David had been scrupulously fair about that. It had been a joint decision. Except that David had thought of it, David had been the one enthused about it, and David had a way of leading you along on the ragged edge of his enthusiasm until you were someplace you hadn’t planned to be, wondering how you got there.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death

“Binder was living on the edge already and knowing it, knowing that he was spending time like money he might not be able to replace.”
― William Gay, Little Sister Death