Addie Bundren Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”