Quotes from William Gay

There's folks you just don't need. You're better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain't in it.

She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look.

He wanted her the rest of his life, and failing that, he wanted permission to walk along beside her while she lived it.

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.

I have a lot of books and books are better if you can share them.

There was something oddly restful about the fireflies. He couldn't put his finger on it but he drew comfort from it anyway. The way they'd seemed not separate entities but a single being, 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.

don't start talkin about books or quotin poems at them. these is good folks but they ain't real crazy about readin books. just do what i do and you'll be all right.

Seems like it's peaceful, just bein' in a country that lays the way you remember it layin

He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages. He felt the ways of men fall from him like sundered shackles.

Outside in the barnlot he looked up and the pale moon was directly over him and all-encompassing. It appeared to be lowering itself onto the earth and he could make out mountains and ranges of hills and hollows and dark shadowed areas of mystery he judged to be timber and he wondered what manner of beast thrived there and what their lives were like and the need to be there twisted in his heart like an old pain that will not dissipate.

Her quickened breath was the very affirmation of life.

He was seized with longing so intense it ached in his chest, he wanted it always to keep, to drag out secretly and study it like a yellowed photograph, and he thought I am home, this is me, this is where I have been rambling down to all these years.

Two, it seemed, could not live nearly as cheaply as one, especially if that one had been accustomed to subsisting on whatever fell to hand, spending what little money he did have in secondhand bookstores.

Binder, in his youth, had always been interested in the supernatural, had felt some deep and nameless affinity for the questions that did not have any answers.

What do you think we ought to do? she asked. Do? Put his sorry ass away. Tell the law and let them open the graves themselves. Put him away forever in some crazyhouse. They'd have to. You think they would? I know they would. What would you do with him? There's supposed to be respect for the dead. It's the way we evolved or something. It's genetic. This man here…he wouldn't cull anything. He'd do anything.

He was wishing the past was a place you could backtrack to, take a sideroad you'd walked hurriedly past, wake somebody from a bad dream he was having.

She looked at him fondly. You won't never make much of a liar, she said. I can see right through you like lookin down into still water. I expect law and politics is goin to be out of your reach.

You get a picture of things in your head and your picture is all you see. You don't know me. You don't even know yourself. All you know is your little picture of how things ought to be, and that's the way you think they are.

She said she loved him and he had no cause to doubt it. They were like a drug in each other's veins. A crazy bad-news drug, their hands trembled with the hypo, the needle prodded for an un-collapsed vein. The drug they used was rare and dangerous with unknown and catastrophic side effects – you couldn't buy it, it had to be stolen under cover of darkness when other folks were asleep or their attention had wandered.

While he slept the world spun on, changed, situations altered and grew more complex, left him more inadequate to deal with them.

It was the first time they had ever talked face to face and Breece divined in a moment of dizzy revelation something about Sutter that no one had noticed before. Why, he is mad, Breece thought. He's not what people say about him at all. He's not just mean as a snake or eccentric or independent. He's as mad as a hatter, and I don't know how they've let him go so long.

Patton's store. A grinning man would halt the wagon with an upraised arm but it would not halt. When he noticed the quiltcovered cargo the wagon transported, he called, What you got there, Sandy? The driver turned and spat and wiped his mouth and glanced back briefly but he didn't stay the wagon. Dead folks, he said.

Times is always hard for some, the old man observed.

No move is the wrong move, What? Sometimes any move at all is better than nothin. If you're right, you're one up. If you're wrong you start over. This sittin and waiting for somebody else to make up their mind is for the God-damned birds. You have to take control of your own life.