Go Down, Moses Quotes

“[] no man is ever free and probably could not bear it if he were...”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“Truth is one. It doesn't change. It covers all things which touch the heart - honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“It was like the last act on a set stage. It was the beginning of the end of something, he didn't know what except that he would not grieve. He would be humble and proud that he had been found worthy to be a part of it too or even just to see it too.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“...lifeless and shockingly alien in that place where dissolution itself was a seething turmoil of ejaculation tumescence conception and birth, and death did not even exit.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“Old man she said, "have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don't remember anything you ever knew or felt about love?”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“...which was no abode of the dead because there was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part, leaf and twig and particle, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn again, dark and dawn and dark and dawn again in their immutable progression and, being myriad, one...”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“...- bu hiçbir zaman sessizlik olmayan sessizlik çok çok büyüktü. Neredeyse görebiliyordu onu, zamanın ötesinden gelen, koskocaman sessizlik, yükseklerden aşağıya bakıyor, düşünceli düşünceli, kısacık tek bir hafta sonra çekip gidecek ve ondan sonraki hafta, yalnızlığın içinde hiçbir iz, hiçbir işaret bırakmayacak olan bu küçücük, bu gelip geçici insan topluluğunu izliyordu. Çünkü burası onun kendi memleketiydi, hiçbir zaman en küçük parçasına sahip olmamıştı ama onundu. Toprak sahibi olmak istememişti, sonunda toprağın başına gelecek felaketi açıkça gördükten sonra bile istememişti bunu, baltanın ve testerenin, kütükleri taşımak için yapılan tren yollarının, daha sonra da dinamitin ve traktör izlerininönünde vahşi toprakların yıldan tıla gerilediğini görmüş, gene de onlara sahip olmak istememişti, çünkü toprak kimsenin malı değildi. Herkese aitti; tek yapılacak şey onu iyi kullanmaktı, alçakgönüllülükle ve gururla. O zaman birden, neden hiç toprak sahibi olmak istemediğini, en azından insanların ilerleme dediği şeyin o kadarını durdurmak, en azından kendi ömrünün uzunluğu süresince toprağın kötü kaderine karşı koymak istemediğini anladı. Bunun nedeni, vahşi toprakların tam yeteri kadar olmasıydı. İkisini - kendini ve vahşi topreaklar- yaşıt gibi görüyordu- ilk soluğunu aldığı zamana göre ormanla kendi çağdaş değillerdi ama, avcı olarak, orman insanı olarak geçirdiği süre içinde ormanın yaşı kendine verilmişti, ve o da bunu, o yaşlı Binbaşı de Spain'den ve ona avlanmayı öğreten o yaşlı Sam Fathers'tan alıp, seve seve, alçakgönüllülükle, sevinçle ve gururla kabul etmişti: ormanla ikisinin ömrü aynı zamanda sona ermekteydi, gittikleri yer bir unutulma, bir hiçlik değildi, zaman ve mekandan bağımsız bir boyuttu; oradadelirmiş eski dünya adamları mermilere dönüştürsün diye pamuk ekmek için bozulup matematiksel karelere bölünmüş ağaçsız topraklarda bir kez daha her ikisi için bol bol yer bulunacaktı- bir süre tanıyıp sevdiği, kendilerinden biraz daha fazla yaşadığı eski insanların adları, yüzleri gene balta girmemiş yüksek ağaçların, göze bile geçit vermeyen sık çalılıkların arasında dolaşacak, ölümsüz avlar, yorgunluk bilmeyen köpeklerin yaygarasının önünde sonsuza dek koşacak, sessiz tüfeklerle vurulup düşecek, sonra Zümrüdüanka gibi gene kalkacaklardı.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“The wagon wound and jolted between the slow and shifting yet constant walls from beyond and above which the wilderness watched them pass, less than inimical now and never to be inimical again since the buck still and forever leaped, the shaking gun-barrels coming constantly and forever steady at last, crashing, and still out of his instant of immortality the buck sprang, forever immortal”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“...seeing as he sat down on the log the crooked print, the warped indentation in the wet ground which while he looked at it continued to fill with water until it was level full and the water began to overflow and the sides of the print began to dissolve away. Even as he looked up he saw the next one, and, moving, the one beyond it; moving, not hurrying, running, but merely keeping pace with them as they appeared before him as though they were being shaped out of thin air just one constant pace short of where he would lose them forever and be lost forever himself, tireless, eager, without doubt or dread, panting a little above the strong rapid little hammer of his heart, emerging suddenly into a little glade and the wilderness coalesced. It rushed, soundless, and solidified––the tree, the bush, the compass and the watch glinting where a ray of sunlight touched them. Then he saw the bear. It did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green and windless noon's hot dappling, not as big as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at him.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it's like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, going. "Wait," he said, talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: "Den lemme go wid you, honey." But she was going.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“When they get done sending you to Parchman you'll have plenty of time between working cotton and corn you aint going to get no third and fourth of even, to study it." They looked at one another.
"Yes sir," George said. 'Especially wid you there to help me worry hit out.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“Because you know that's all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me and run. I know you aint going to. Because all you got to beat is me. I got to beat old Carothers. Get your pistol."
"No," the other said. "Go home. Get out of here. Tonight I will come to your house-----"
"After this?" Lucas said. "Me and you, in the same country, breathing the same air even? No matter what you could say, what you could even prove so I would have to believe it, after this? Get your pistol.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing;”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it’s like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“She was too young to be married and face all the troubles which married people had to get through in order to become old and find out for themselves the taste and savor of peace.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“Win?” Uncle Buck said. “The one that wins buys the niggers?”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“The faint frail voice was already lost in the night’s infinitude, his shadow and that of the dog scudding the free miles, the deep strong panting of his chest running free as air now because he was all right.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“It was empty at this hour of Sunday evening—no family in wagon, no writer, no walkers churchward to speak to him and carefully refrain from looking after him when he had passed—the pale, powder-light, powder-dry dust of August from which the long week's marks of hoof and wheel had been blotted by the strolling and unhurried Sunday shoes, with somewhere beneath them, vanished but not gone, fixed and held in the annealing dust, the narrow, splaytoed prints of his wife's bare feet where on Saturday afternoons she would walk to the commissary to buy their next week's supplies while he took his bath; himself, his own prints, setting the period now, as he strode on, moving almost as fast as a smaller man could have trotted, his body breasting the air her body had vacated, his eyes touching the objects—post and tree and field and house and hill—her eyes had lost.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“Just like folks. Put off as long as she could having to be brave, knowing all the time that sooner or later she would have to be brave once so she could keep on calling herself a dog, and knowing beforehand what was going to happen when she done it.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“He is both heir and prototype simultaneously of all the geography and climate and biology
which sired old Carothers and all the rest of us and our kind, myriad, countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who fathered himself, intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all blood black white yellow or red, including his own.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“I suppose the question to ask you, is where you been all the time you were dead?”
― William Faulkner , Go Down, Moses

“… This was chronicled in a harsher book and McCaslin, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, had seen it and the boy himself had inherited it as Noah’s grandchildren had inherited the Flood although they had not been there to see the deluge: that dark corrupt and bloody time while three separate people had tried to adjust not only to one another but to the new land which they had created and inherited too and must live in for the reason that those who had lost it were no less free to quit it than those who had gained it were: – those upon whom freedom and equality had been dumped overnight and without warning or preparation or any training in how to employ it or even just endure it and who misused it not as children would nor yet because they had been so long in bondage and then so suddenly freed, but misused it as human beings always misused freedom, so that he thought Apparently there is a wisdom beyond even that learned through suffiring necessary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license; those who had fought for four years and lost to preserve a condition under which that franchisement was anomaly and paradox, for the old reasons for which man (not the generals and politicians but man) has always fought and died in wars: to preserve a status quo or to establish a better future one to endure for his children; and lastly, as if that were not enough for bitterness and hatred and fear, that third race even more alien to the people whom they resembled in pigment and in whom even the same blood ran, than to the people whom they did not, – that race threefold in one and alien even among themselves save for a single fierce aged Quartermaster lieutenants and Army sutlers and contractors in military blankets and shoes and transport mules, who followed the battles they themselves had not fought and inherited the conquest they themselves had not helped to gain, sanctioned and protected even if not blessed, and left their bones and in another generation would be engaged in a fierce economic competition of small sloven farms with the black men they were supposed to have freed and the white descendants of fathers who had owned no slaves anyway whom they were supposed to have disinherited and in the third generation would be back once more in the little lost country seats as barbers and garage mechanics and deputy sheriffs and mill- and gin-hands and power-plant firemen, leading, first in mufti then later in an actual formalized regalia of hooded sheets and passwords and fiery Christian symbols, lynching mobs against the race their ancestors had come to save: and of all that other nameless horde of speculators in human misery, manipulators of money and politics and land, who follow catastrophe and are their own protection as grasshoppers are and need no blessing and sweat no plow or axe-helve and batten and vanish and leave no bones, just as they derived apparently from no ancestry, no mortal flesh, no act even of passion or even of lust: and the Jew who came without protection too since after two thousand years he had got out of the habit of being or needing it, and solitary, without even the solidarity of the locusts and in this a sort of courage since he had come thinking not in terms of simple pillage but in terms of his great-grand-children, seeking yet some place to establish them to endure even though forever alien: and unblessed: a pariah about the face of the Western earth which twenty centuries later was still taking revenge on him for the fairy tale with which he had conquered it. …”
― William Faulkner, Go Down Moses

“So that's it," he said. "Three hundred dollars. I wish somebody would come into this country with a seed that had to be worked everyday from New Year's right on through Christmas. As soon as you niggers are laid-by, trouble starts.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“There had been three of them once: James, then a sister named Fonsiba, then Lucas, children of Aunt Tomey's Turl, old Carother McCaslin's son, and Tennie Beauchamp, whom Edmonds' great-uncle Amodeus McCaslin won from a neighbor in a poker game in 1859. . .But James, the eldest, ran away before he became of age and didn't stop until he had crossed the Ohio River and they never heard from or of him again at all––that is, that his white kindred ever knew. It was as though he had not only. . .put running water between himself and the land of his grandmother's betrayal and his father's nameless birth, but he had interposed latitude and geography too, shaking from his feet forever the very dust of the land where his white ancestor could acknowledge or repudiate him from one day to another, according to his whim, but where he dared not even repudiate the white ancestor save when it met the white man's humor of the moment.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“The razor hung between his shoulder-blades from a loop of cotton string round his neck inside his shirt. The same motion of the hand which brought the razor forward over his shoulder flipped the blade open and freed it from the cord, the blade opening on until the back edge of it lay across the knuckles of his fist, his thumb pressing the handle into his closing fingers, so that in the second before the half-drawn pistol exploded he actually struck at the white man's throat not with the blade but with a sweeping blow of his fist, following through in the same motion so that not even the first jet of blood touched his hand or arm.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“who would ask nothing of you and expect less and get even still less than”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses