As I Lay Dying Quotes

“Dewey Dell rises, heaving to her feet. She looks down at the face. It is like a casting of fading bronze upon the pillow, the hands alone still with any semblance of life: a curled, gnarled inertness; a spent yet alert quality from which weariness, exhaustion, travail had not yet departed, as though they doubted even yet the actuality of rest, guarding with horned and penurious alertness the cessation which they know cannot last.”

“I am not crying now. I am not anything.”

“I be durn if it didn’t give me the creeps.”

“The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

“My mother is a fish.”

“Sometimes I lose faith in human nature for a time; I am assailed by doubt.”

“The dead air shapes the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth.”

“I don’t know if a little music aint about the nicest thing a fellow can have.”

“One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet.”

“I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it.”

“Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way.”

“Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old yours, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills do you can ride down.”

“At first I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would have to haul her back.”

“I tried to do as she would wish it. The Lord will pardon me and excuse the conduct of them He sent me.”

“Now and then a fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it’s liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.”

“I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not.”

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack.”

“I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He love, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be firm if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.”

“Cash is wet to the skin. Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.”

“It wasn’t on a balance. I told them that if they wanted it to tote and ride on a balance, they would have to “