Emily Grierson Quotes

“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town . . .”

“Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.”

“Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. ”

“When she got to be thirty and was still single, we were ... vindicated.”

“With nothing left, she would ... cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. ”

“Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies’ magazines.”

“Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.”

“They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.”

“From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting.”

“When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: “For rats.”″

“After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.”

“At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. ”

“She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. ”

“So [Miss Emily] vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.”

“She carried her head high enough—even when we believed that she was fallen. ”

″...a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment...”

“The women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.”