Light in AugustQuiz Chapters 19-21

And a few that appear earlier . . . .

• It’s a poor thing to ask. God knows I know that. I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that’s why don’t anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good cant. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad.” 390

• “You could say he was here with you that night. Every night when Brown said he watched him go up to the big house and go in it. Folks would believe you. They would believe that, anyway. They would rather believe that about you than to believe that he lived with her like a husband and then killed her. And you are old now. They wouldn’t do anything to you about it that would hurt you now.” 390

• “It’s not because I cant, don’t dare to. It’s because I wont! I won! Do you hear?” 393

• But his blood would not be quiet, let him save it. It would not be either one or the other and let his body save itself. Because the black blood drove him first to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as it was the black blood which snatched up the pistol and the white blood which would not let him fire it.

• A sublime and implicit faith in physical courage and blind obedience, and a belief that the white race is superior to any and other races and that the American is superior to all other white races and that the American uniform is superior to all men . . .

• “We got to preserve order. We must let the law take its course.”

• The bicycle possessed neither horn nor bell. Yet they sense him somehow and made way; in this too he seemed to be served by certitude, the blind and untroubled faith in the rightness and infallibility of his actions.

• “Men!” Listen to me. He was here that night. He was with me the night of the murder. I swear to God---”

• “Jesus Christ! Has every preacher and old maid in Jefferson taken their pants down to the yellowbellied son of a bitch!”

• “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell.”

• Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pen black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; up that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it . .

• In whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant. Again from the town, deadened a little by the walls, the scream of the siren mounted toward its unbelievable crescendo, passing out of the realm of hearing.

• The phantoms were his father, his mother, and an old negro woman.

• I see. That’s the way it is. Marriage. Yes. I see now.

• “ A man growed, wid a married son, gone to a war whar his business was killin Yankees, killed in somebody else’s henhouse wid a han’full of feathers. Stealing chickens.”

• But I was young then. I had to do, not what I could, but what I knew. And after all, I have paid. I have bought my ghost, even though I did pay for it with my life. And who can forbid me doing that? It is any man’s privilege to destroy himself, so long as he does not injure anyone else, so long as he lives to and of himself---” 490

• In the lambent suspension of August into which night is about to fully come, it seems to engender and surround itself with a faint glow like a halo. The halo is full of faces. 491

He hears above his heart the thunder increase, myriad and drumming. Like a long sighing of wind in trees it begins, then they sweep into sight, borne now upon a cloud of phantom dust. They rush past, forwardleaning in the saddles, with brandished arms . .They rush past, are gone. Yet, leaning forward in the window, his bandaged head huge and without depth above the twin blobs of his hands upon the ledge, it seems to him that he still hears them: the wild bugles and the clashing sabres and the dying thunder of hooves.

“Why, Mr. Bunch. Aint you ashamed. You might have woke the baby too.”

• Yes sir. You cant beat a woman. Because do you know what I think? I think she was just travelling. I dont think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following. I don’t think she had ever aimed to, only she hadn’t told him yet. I recon this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life. And that she had got along all right this far, with folks taking good care of her . .since I reckon she knew that when she settled down this time, ti would liely be for the rest of her life. “

• “My, my. A body does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee.”