WILLIAM
FAULKNER.
. . . too many
of us not because of the room we take up but because we are willing to sell
liberty short at any tawdry price for the sake of what we call our own which is
a constitutional statutory licence to pursue each his private postulate of
happiness and contentment regardless of grief and cost even to the crucifixion
of someone whose nose or pigment we don’t like
and even these can be coped with provided that few of others who believe
that a human lie is valuable simply because it has a right to keep o breathing
no matter what pigment its lungs distend or nose inhales the air and are
willing to defend that right at any price . . .
─ Intruder in the Dust
. . . since
what sets a man writhing sleepless in bad at night is not having injured his
fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury (if he cannot justify it
with what he calls logic) he can efface by destroying the victim and the
witnesses but the mistake is his and that is one of the cats which he always
prefers to choke to death with butter.
─ Intruder in the Dust
Thou shalt not kill you see – no accusative, heartless: a simple moral
precept; we have accepted it in the distant anonymity of our forefathers, had
it so long cherished it, fed it, kept the sound of it alive and the very words
themselves unchanged, handled it so long that all the corners are now worn
smoothly off; we can sleep right in the bed with it; we have even distilled our
own antidotes for it as the foresighted housewife keeps a solution if mustard or handy eggwhites on
the same shelf with the rat poison; as familiar as grandpa’s face, as
unrecognizable as grandpa’s face beneath the turban of an Indian prince, as
abstract as grandpa’s flatulence at the family supper-table; even when it
breaks down and the spilled blood stands sharp and glaring in our faces we
still have the percept, still intact, still true: we shall not kill and maybe next time we even wont. But thou shalt not kill thy mother’s child.
It came right down into the street that time to walk in broad daylight at your
elbow, didn’t it?’
─ Intruder in the Dust
. . murderers
are gamblers and like the amateur gambler the amateur murderer believes first
not in his luck but in long shots, that the long shot will win simply because
it’s a long shot . . .
─ Intruder in the Dust
Some things
you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to
bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonour and shame. No matter how young you
are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in
the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them. (p. 733)
─ Intruder in the Dust
Sitting around
in a lawyer’s office until twelve o’ clock at night is no place for a lady.
─ Intruder in the Dust
. . one
shame if shame must be, one expiation since expiation must surely be but above
all one unalterable durable impregnable one: one people one heart one land: . .
.
─ Intruder in the Dust
. . . how of
all human pursuits murder has the most deadly need of privacy; how man will go
to almost any lengths to preserve the solitude in which he evacuates or makes
love but he will go to any length for that in which he takes life, even to
homicide, yet by no act can he more completely and irrevocably destroy it:
─ Intruder in the Dust
It was of
brick, square, proportioned, with four brick columns in shallow basrelief across the front and even brick cornice under
the eaves because it was old, but built in a time when people took time to
build even jails with grace and care and he remembered how his uncle had said
once that not courthouses nor even churches
but jails were the true records of a country’s, a community’s, history,
since not only the cryptic forgotten initials and words and even phrases cries
of defiance and indictment scathed into the walls but the very bricks and
stones themselves held, not in solution but in suspension, intact and biding
and potent and indestructible, the agonies and shames and grieves with which
hearts long since unmarked and unremembered dust had strained and perhaps burst.
─ Intruder in the Dust
But the lawyer
should know all the facts, everything. He is the one to decide what to tell and
what not to tell. Else, why have one? That’s like paying a dentist to fix your
teeth and then refusing to let him look into your mouth, don’t you see? You
wouldn’t treat a dentist or a doctor this way.’
─ Sanctuary
When a man
swaps horse for horse, that’s one thing and let the devil protect him if the
devil can. But when cash money starts changing hands, that’s something else.
And for a stranger to come in and start that cash money to changing and jumping
from one fellow to another, it’s like when a burglar breaks into your house and
flings your things ever which way even if he dont take nothing. It makes you
twice as mad.
— The Hamlet
f a fellow’s
got to choose between a man that is a murderer and one he just thinks maybe is,
he’ll choose the murderer. At least then he will know exactly where he’s at.
His attention aint going to wander then.
— The Hamlet
No comments:
Post a Comment