Quotes from William Gay

What do you want? You're finished. You don't begin to suspect how finished you are. When all these people hear about what you've done to their folks, they're just going to mob you. They'd hang you, but you won't last that long. They'll tear you apart like a pack of dogs.

He thinks he's all aces but he's mostly sevens and eights.

The screen door opened, slapped loudly shut. An enormous woman had come onto the porch, a woman with a fierce turtle like face and wild frizzy carrot colored hair. She was wearing a bright yellow tent size dress with dark half moons of sweat fanning out from the armpits.

He has all the time in the world, he can pick and choose, all the time you have is the moment of his arrival.

He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker's keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silences.

What advice Phelan could possibly have given him. All these myriad differences between the world he was discovering and the world he'd been taught. There was nothing in Yeats or Eliot or Browning to cover this: had the situation been reversed, Phelan would probably have been coming to him for advice. He wondered how Eliot would have fared against the look in Sutter's dead eyes.

I can do this, he was thinking. All I have to do is just be as normal as everyone else. All I have to do is just not blow apart like a two-dollar clock. Just pick words and put one of them after the other like a baby learning to walk, like a drunk carefully crossing the street.

If there's one thing I never mistook about it's the sound of a whiskey bottle lid being screwed off. There ain't nothing else in the world sounds like it.

Binder didn't plan on being disappointed either. He felt a growing obsession to unstring the secrets the house held, to unravel the Gordian knot time and myth had only tightened.

Hunkered there in the darkness, he felt before himself a door, madness already raising the hand to knock.

He was used to shotgun shacks with cracks you could have thrown a good-sized housecat through and floors through whose cracks a man could watch his chickens scratching for worms, if he was lucky enough to possess any chickens.

The cornfield seemed darker toward its center. Light entered at the rows' end, ran like liquid down the middles, getting shallower and shallower. There seemed at the convergence of the rows some mass of shadows light could not defray.

When I was your age these warm nights you couldn't of held me down with a log chain. I'd do anything. I'd wake up in Alaska hung over with my beard froze to the ground. I'd hang around and pick me up one of them young girls that wanders around. Take her down by the tie yard and throw a tool to her.

You afoot, the old man said. I knowed your walk the minute I seen you. You always walked like you had the world in your hip pocket. You ain't though, have you? Last time I seen you you was in a fine car. You had big plans.

Sometimes I think you're just too sweet to die Sometimes I think you're just too sweet to die Another time I think you oughta be buried alive. —RICHARD "RABBIT" BROWN, James Alley Blues, 1927

The last time I saw my woman she had a wine glass in her hand. She was drinking down her troubles with a no good sorry man.

I seen a pretty woman in a red dress, the old man said. And then I seen her take it off. What else is there?

Fleming was silent. He'd been given the kiss of death. He did not want to be nice. He wanted to be wild and reckless, a rake and a rambling man, the highwayman who came riding, riding up to the old inn door.

I've been through hell and just barely got scorched.

the history of any family is a history of death and misfortune.

You always was a skinny child but turn sideways you just ain't there atall.

There was something mystic about crossroads, they doubled the options, confused both pursuer and pursued.

S]ometimes 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.

Binder was living on the edge already and knowing it, knowing that he was spending time like money he might not be able to replace.