Quotes from William Gay

After a while a three-quarter moon eased up over the treeline and the dusty road went white as milk, Rorshach patches of grass bleeding through the white dust that rose and subsided with Boyd's footfalls.

He heard footsteps on the ice and just as someone pounded on the door death came swiftly into the trailer like a physical presence. It came swiftly up the steps and turned the knob and so through the door, crossing the linoleum with a sure firm footstep toward where the old man sat on the bed with the pistol in his hand.

He lay on the bed and he felt he might never rise from it. He lay in an enormous torpor. The world was too heavy to bear and it was settling itself onto his chest. He felt old, old. Civilizations had risen and fallen in the brief time that he had lived. He felt that when the old man's head exploded across the snow he should have turned the gun on himself.

Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time.

Truth had hanged the way the landscape had changed to accommodate progress, altered by each generation to its purpose. He had learned from the talk of old men that there was no such thing as truth, truth was always shaded by perception and expectation.

He was continually called upon to explain himself and day by day it had grown harder so that by now there didn't seem to be any words, the right phrases hadn't been coined yet.

The day drew on, was swallowed in dusk. No bird called, no insect. Life in abeyance, the world itself grinding to a halt, who knew what would follow. Light through the glass grew dim but he read on as if the passage of day into night was of no moment. The world was winding down, and young Bloodworth wound down with it.

Hovington cowered on the porch alternately praying and swearing in a desperate attempt to cover all the bases.

They trickled down sunless corridors and burst capillaries until they were in the city's dark heart. A city within a city where the blood slowed and thickened and clotted in viscous smears of alizarin crimson dried to burnt sienna around the edges.

He had no faith in the permanence of any of this. What he'd seen of life had shown him that the world had little of comfort or assurance. He suspected that there were no givens, no map through the maze. Here in falling dark with the world rolling simultaneously toward him and away from him everything seemed no more than random. Life blindsides you so hard you can taste the bright copper blood in your mouth then it beguiles you with a gift of profound and appalling beauty.

For the first time in his life he realized that sometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.

Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them. —CORMAC MCCARTHY, Child of God, 1973

It was a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it.

He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside.

He was driving into a world where the owls roosted with the chickens, where folks kept whippoorwills for pets and didn't get the Saturday Night Opry till Monday morning.

For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first.

He seemed to be drawing inward toward some point at which he would be reduced to the fundamental essence of himself.

Folks called this place haunted, felt the emanations of an unspeakable act moving outward like ripples on water.

As night deepened all he could see was the shifting line of fire, like some malfunction in the wiring of the world itself, as if the very night had combusted and was creeping incrementally toward him.

But blood is never left up to you, blood will call to blood. You can't deny your own kin.

Songs about death and lost love and rambling down the line because sometimes down the line was the only place left.

You don't learn that, she said. It's just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget it.

He went through the back door into the long narrow kitchen, feeling as he always did the sudden onslaught of time, enthralled by the myriad smells of the kitchen: coffee and cloves and cinnamon, the heavy fruity odor of basketed apples and the faintly sour smell of dried peaches, and some other odor, rich and dark and mysterious, that was the odor of time itself, of days the old woman had stacked into years as carefully as a mason lays one stone atop another to construct a wall.

a moving river of light that flowed above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night. BOOK THREE