As I Lay Dying quotes

Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.

Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.

a good carpenter, Cash is. He holds the two planks on the trestle, fitted along the edges in a quarter of the finished box. He kneels and squints along the edge of them, then he lowers them and takes up the adze.

A good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, a better box to lie in.

It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the

“Jewel,” I say. Back running, tunnelled between the two sets of bobbing mule ears, the road vanishes beneath the wagon as though it were a ribbon and the front axle were a spool. “Do you know she is going to die, Jewel?”

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

I said to Dewey Dell: “You want her to die so you can get to town: is that it?” She wouldn’t say what we both knew.

I don’t know what it is. I don’t know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not. I don’t know whether I can cry or not. I don’t know whether I have tried to or not.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

I held the lamp up, with the rain sparkling across it and Cora back in the hall saying “Who is it, Vernon?” but I couldn’t see nobody a-tall at first until I looked down and around the door, lowering the lamp.

He looked like a drowned puppy, in them overalls, without no hat, splashed up to his knees where he had walked them four miles in the mud.

“Well, I’ll be durned,” I says.

Then he takes up box, lantern and raincoat and returns to the house, mounting the steps into faint silhouette against the paling east.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not.

And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not.

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.

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

Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not.

And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

I made it on the bevel.

There is more surface for the nails to grip.

So I made it on the bevel.

It makes a neater job.

“Ay,” Uncle Billy says. “

It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.

”

“Goddamn you,” he says. “Goddamn you.”

I cannot love my mother because I have no mother. Jewel’s mother is a horse.

Motionless, the tall buzzards hang in soaring circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of retrograde.

“I know it,” Darl said. “That’s why I am not is.

Are is too many for one woman to foal.

”

“Do you want him to come all the way back here and carry them up to Tull’s afoot?” Darl says. Pa looks at Darl, his mouth chewing.

Pa shaves every day now because my mother is a fish.

“It ain’t right,” pa says.

“Don’t you touch me!” she says. “Don’t you touch me!”

A man can’t tell nothing about them. I lived with the same one fifteen years and I be durn if I can.

And I imagined a lot of things coming up between us, but I be durn if I ever thought it would be a body four days dead and that a woman.

I heard that my mother is dead.

I wish I had time to let her die.

I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It’s not that I wouldn’t and will not it’s that it is too soon too soon too soon.

It was grey, with his eyes closed and a long swipe of mud across his face. Then he let go and turned over in the water. He looked just like an old bundle of clothes kind of washing up and down against the bank.

He looked like he was laying there in the water on his face, rocking up and down a little, looking at something on the bottom.

We could watch the rope cutting down into the water, and we could feel the weight of the wagon kind of blump and lunge lazy like, like it just as soon as not, and that rope cutting down into the water hard as a iron …

When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch:

Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own forever and ever.

And so I took Anse. I saw him pass the schoolhouse three or four times before I learned that he was driving four miles out of his way to do it.

When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not.

I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

I knew that it had been, not that they had dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of …

And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother,

I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it

, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other;

of none and of all. Then I found that I had Jewel. When I waked to remember to discover it, he was two months gone.

My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead.

I knew at last what he meant and that he could not have known what he meant himself, because a man cannot know anything about cleaning up the house afterward. And so I have cleaned my house.

“Tell him to go on,” Cash says. We go on. Dewey Dell leans back and wipes Cash’s face.

Cash is my brother. But Jewel’s mother is a horse. My mother is a fish.

Darl says that when we come to the water again I might see her and Dewey Dell said, She’s in the box; how could she have got out?

You have to humour them. You save time by it. I followed her to the back. She put her hand on the gate. “There’s nothing back there but the prescription case,” I said. “What do you want?” She stopped and looked at me.

It was like she had taken some kind of a lid off her face, her eyes.

It was her eyes: kind of dumb and hopeful and sullenly willing to be disappointed all at the same time. But she was in trouble of some sort; I could see that. “What’s your trouble?” I said. “Tell me what it is you want.

“It feels fine,” Cash says.

If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time.

We replace the splints, the cords, drawing them tight, the cement in thick pale green slow surges among the cords, Cash watching us quietly with that profound questioning look.

“What does she want Him to do?” I say.

“She wants Him to hide her away from the sight of man,” Darl says.

“Why does she want to hide her away from the sight of man, Darl?”

He pauses at the coffin, stooping, looking at me, his face furious.

Overhead the flames sound like thunder; across us rushes a cool draught

: there is no heat in it at all yet, and a handful of chaff lifts suddenly and sucks swiftly along the stalls where a horse is screaming. “Quick,” I say; “the horses.”

He glares a moment longer at me, then at the roof overhead, then he leaps toward the stall where the horse screams. It plunges and kicks, the sound of the crashing blows sucking up into the sound of the flames.

They sound like an interminable train crossing an endless trestle.

Gillespie and Mack pass me, in knee-length nightshirts, shouting, their voices thin and high and meaningless and at the same time profoundly wild and sad: “… cow … stall …” Gillespie’s nightshirt rushes ahead of him on the draft, ballooning about his hairy thighs.

“We’ll have to take him to the doctor,” pa says. “I reckon it ain’t no way around it.” The back of Jewel’s shirt, where it touches him, stains slow and black with grease.

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up on to the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs.

That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.

Sometimes I think it ain’t none of us pure crazy and ain’t none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way.

It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

Because Jewel is too hard on him. Of course it was Jewel’s horse was traded to get her that nigh to town, and in a sense it was the value of his horse Darl tried to burn up.

Sometimes I ain’t so sho who’s got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain’t.

Sometimes I think it ain’t none of us pure crazy and ain’t none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way.

It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

It’s like some folks has the smooth, pretty boards to build a courthouse with and others don’t have no more than rough lumber fitten to build a chicken coop.

But it’s better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse

, and when they both build shoddy or build well, neither because it’s one or tother is going to make a man feel the better nor the worse.

“Maybe they got one here,” he said. He pulled up at Mrs. Bundren’s. It was like he knowed.

Sometimes I think that if a working man could see work as far ahead as a lazy man can see laziness.

So he stopped there like he knowed, before that little new house, where the music was. We waited there, hearing it. I believe I could have dickered Suratt down to five dollars on that one of his. It’s a comfortable thing, music is.

But I ain’t so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what ain’t.

It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

“That’s right,” I said. “

Of course he’d have to borrow a spade to bury his wife with. Unless he could borrow a hole in the ground.

Too bad you all didn’t put him in it too. … Does that hurt?”