Quotes from William Gay

She suddenly heard a wave of sound, cicadas and whippoorwills and crickets that just abruptly assailed her, and she wondered if they'd just begun or if they had already been calling and all she'd heard was the banjo music, ancient and myth-laden and somehow enticing, like sound seeping through the cracks of a place you couldn't get to anymore

She had grown stingy with words, whole days spent in sullen silence, as if her supply of words was being exhausted and she must parcel them out one by one.

It ain't never far to a bootlegger

From the shade of the Ivy covered porch the old men sat in ladder back chairs and watched the hot blacktop. They'd sit day long and wait for something to happen, anything to happen, waiting for the road to entertain them. These were old man in clean shirts and suspenders and pants so roomy they could've held another old-timer and shoes split down the sides for comfort.

Then the babies started comin, the old man went on. They never heard of rubbers, I reckon, or maybe they figured that that would be cheatin. One of the youngest of them girls told me one time, she was drinkin a little or she never would have told it, she said her sisters would bury them babies in widemouth Mason fruit jars.

There's things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross em you got to take what comes.

He stayed out of the house, he was much of the time in the woods, he felt like some animal half domesticated but ultimately unable to resist the feral ways of the forest. The spring nights were fecund and warm and alive, and there were nights he did not come in at all.

Together they knitted whole the fabric of night where violence had rent it. Everything was always changing and everything was always the same.

She was as square and solid and unlovely as a wooden packing crate. Her high complexioned moon shaped face bloomed with the high blood pressure she suffered from and her hair was dyed a hard bright orange that nature would have been hard put to replicate.

Then what had been at the bottom of his mind all along surfaced, like a rotten log in a swamp brought up by its own putrescent gases. A headline from last summer's newspaper: LOCAL MAN INDICTED FOR MURDER. A measure of peace returned to him. A feeling of self-confidence, of being in good hands. Granville Sutter, he thought.

Music had been his undoing, he told the boy in ironic self-deprecation. His bane and his salvation. It had gotten him through tough times that would have otherwise been unbearable and it had made everything else he had gone at twice as hard.

There was more wickedness in the world than you thought and you've stirred it up and got it on you, ain't ye?

You southerners, he said. I've been here for fifteen years and I'll never understand you.

I thought you looked like a man with a bridge on fire, she said.

Fleming doubted all this but he listened anyway and thought with a kind of sardonic amusement that before the night was over life itself might grasp him by the scruff of the neck and jerk him out of the doldrums he seemed grounded in and into its swifter currents.

When Tyler fled and Sutter pursued him, this was the closest thing to a wilderness there was, and there was really no thought of going anywhere else, and as these fugitives, mentor and protégé, fled from a world that still adhered to form and order they were fleeing not only geographically but chronologically, for they were fleeing into the past.

Sometimes any move at all is better than nothin. If you're right you're one up. If you're wrong you start over.

Even when he'd arrived he'd had restless eyes, eyes that were always looking about as if he might notice some place he'd rather be and head out for it immediately.

The old man always used too much of everything, too many lemons, too much sugar, as if halfmeasures at anything were beneath him.

The man wore a dark fedora and beneath its brim the fierce empty eyes looked out as if they were coming from a thousand miles away, and were off immediately another thousand in some other direction.

Julia Bradshaw was part Cherokee Indian. She was small and dark and the inscrutability of her eyes hinted at enigmas a man might unravel would he take the time to try. Bloodworth was to learn that it is the nature of an enigma to remain unsolved, and that inscrutability means just what it says.

Before she'd shared his bed, life had been pointless, but now it had become unbearable. She had appeared from nowhere and returned to it, but she'd taken over his life, left with a lien on his body, a mortgage on his soul.

When the plane exploded fire went streaking down the wall of night like trails of phosphorous from a firework of unreckonable magnitude and cascaded away in a shower of falling stars, touching the velvet balsams with a profound and eerie beauty.

Beyond the mothriddled light their faces were rapt and transfixed, he sang about death as if it was the only kept promise out of all life's false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road, his voice told them about calm and quiet and eternal rest. No landlord, no cotton to chop, no ticket at the company store growing like a cancer. Just time itself frozen like leaves in winter ice and nothing in the round world to worry about or dread.