Stories from the Attic Quotes

“You just the organ grinder monkey, he told her. Alvin turns the crank and you just hold the cup for the pennies.”
― William Gay, Stories from the Attic

“I was changing, and it scared me, for I wanted to be a child always, and I did not want Dug to grow up. I wanted it to always be brittle cold November and both of us working there in that field, with birds flying and calling lonesome far above, and looking forward to how good the fire would feel at the end of the day. But that kind of thing can never be, and that is what hurt me like a knife.”
― William Gay, Stories from the Attic

“The world will take care of you if you'll let it. If you go in the same direction nature wants to go but cross it and it will destroy you. Fight it and it'll break you like a prisoner on the wheel and rack.”
― William Gay, Stories from the Attic

“Though Faulkner has written at times about depraved people doing depraved things, he never denies his characters their basic humanity. He does not condescend to them and he always allows them whatever modicum or dignity they are entitled to; his humor and compassion are always in evidence.”
― William Gay, Stories from the Attic

“Someday someone will write an essay giving Signet books the credit they deserve for educating a certain segment of the young South. For twenty-five cents (thirty-five for Signet Giants) you could own a novel you would read time and again. And Signet had everyone: Faulkner and O'Conner and Truman Capote.”
― William Gay, Stories from the Attic

“Vestal believed you had to take responsibility for everything you did, all the commissions and omissions, the deeds and undeeds. Everything was accounting, everything went into columns marked profit or loss, there was not column marked good intentions, none for holding your own.”
― William Gay, Stories from the Attic

“In the shady quiet of the woods, peace flowed over him like soothing balm. No creditors assailed him here and the old woman did not have the breath for the hills. In hollows grown chest high with briars he sometimes came upon the remains of houses, like falling ruins of some forgotten race. He wandered through them, kicking aside ancient rubbish, passing through shades of lives lived out long hence.”
― William Gay, Stories from the Attic