As I Lay Dying

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying lightly in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

How often have Ι lain beneath rain on a strange roof thinking of home.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

They pulled two seats together so Darl could sit by the window. One of them sat beside him, the other sat on the seat facing him, riding backward. One of them had to ride backward because state's money has a face to each backside and a backside to each face, and they are riding on the state's money which is incest. A nickel has a woman on one side and a buffalo on the other; two faces and no back. I don't know what that is. Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face. I know what that is.

My mother is a fish.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

Sometimes I think it ain’t none of us pure crazy and ain’t none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it ain’t so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.