# Quote — William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

> ... in the commissary as it should have been, not the heart perhaps but certainly the solar-plexus of the repudiated and relinquished: the square, galleried, wooden building squatting like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in thrall ‘65 or no and placarded over with advertisements for snuff and cures for chills and salves and potions manufactured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and straighten the hair of negroes that they might resemble the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would have set them completely free.

- Author: [William Faulkner](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-faulkner.md)
- Book: [Go Down, Moses](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-faulkner/go-down-moses.md)
- Page: 244
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Faulkner#Go_Down,_Moses_(1942)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-faulkner/go-down-moses/in-the-commissary

## More from this book

> So let me say it: That nevertheless and notwithstanding old Carothers did own it. Bought it, got it, no matter; kept it, held it, no matter; bequeathed it: else why do you stand here relinquishing and repudiating? Held it, kept it for fifty years until you could repudiate it, while He—this Arbiter, this Architect, this Umpire—condoned—or did He? Looked down and saw—or did He? Or at least did nothing: saw, and could not, or did not see; saw, and would not, or perhaps He would not see—perverse, impotent, or blind: which?

p. 247 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-faulkner/go-down-moses/so-let-me-say.md)

> You said how on that instant when Ikkemotubbe realised that he could sell the land to Grandfather, it ceased forever to have been his.

p. 286 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-faulkner/go-down-moses/you-said-how.md)

> He will need to be just a little bigger than smart, and a little braver than either.

p. 203 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-faulkner/go-down-moses/he-will-need.md)