William Gay Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — William Gay

They've always told that when Granville was a boy he woke up one time in the middle of the night and she was settin on the side of the bed watchin him and she was holdin a butcher knife. Said she was watchin him, but it was like shewasn't really seein him. He laid awake the balance of the night waitin to see what she'd do, then he took to sleepin in the woods or in the barn. Just wherever. She'd set up all night like she was studyin about somethin. They took to hidin all the knives. — William Gay

He feared that beyond the quilted gray satin of the undertaker's keep there was only a world of mystery that bypassed the comprehension of men and did not even take them into consideration. A world of utter darkness and the profoundest of silences. — William Gay

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. — William Gay

I just couldn't stand that goddamned yip yip yip. — William Gay

What do you want? You're finished. You don't begin to suspect how finished you are. When all these people hear about what you've done to their folks, they're just going to mob you. They'd hang you, but you won't last that long. They'll tear you apart like a pack of dogs. — William Gay

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. — William Gay

He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside. — William Gay

I can do this, he was thinking. All I have to do is just be as normal as everyone else. All I have to do is just not blow apart like a two-dollar clock. Just pick words and put one of them after the other like a baby learning to walk, like a drunk carefully crossing the street. — William Gay

In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accreations of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the web of the world. — William Gay

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. — William Gay

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

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. — William Gay

Truth had hanged the way the landscape had changed to accommodate progress, altered by each generation to its purpose. He had learned from the talk of old men that there was no such thing as truth, truth was always shaded by perception and expectation. — William Gay

The near dark streets where Friday night's business began to accomplish itself, strolling couples, arm in arm, girls bright as just pricked flowers, halfdrunk belligerent men herded homeward by fierce women with bitter persecuted faces ... — William Gay

Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time. — William Gay

Binder didn't plan on being disappointed either. He felt a growing obsession to unstring the secrets the house held, to unravel the Gordian knot time and myth had only tightened. — 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. — William Gay

Listen, he said vehemently. Somebody's going to have to say what they really mean and then do what they say they will. All this lying. All this bullshit and pretending. It's just wasting lives, wasting time, everything's just a waste.
She was looking at him curiously. That's just the way people are. The way the world is. What are you trying to do, fix the world?
I don't want to fix the world. Fuck the world. Just the little part of it that I have to live on. You and that old man. Folks starting babies andd walking off like that's got nothing to do with them. People walking off while you're asleep and never coming back. Leaving a note. A Goddamned note. Old people living a half mile apart and wanting to see each other and dying without doing it. Now that's crazy for you. That's what's crazy. — William Gay

What advice Phelan could possibly have given him. All these myriad differences between the world he was discovering and the world he'd been taught. There was nothing in Yeats or Eliot or Browning to cover this: had the situation been reversed, Phelan would probably have been coming to him for advice. He wondered how Eliot would have fared against the look in Sutter's dead eyes. — William Gay

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

Today she had felt like a child forced to play grownup in a cavernous nineteenth-century house with someone else's furniture, someone else's past. Though not forced, she thought hastily. David had been scrupulously fair about that. It had been a joint decision. Except that David had thought of it, David had been the one enthused about it, and David had a way of leading you along on the ragged edge of his enthusiasm until you were someplace you hadn't planned to be, wondering how you got there. — William Gay

The day drew on, was swallowed in dusk. No bird called, no insect. Life in abeyance, the world itself grinding to a halt, who knew what would follow. Light through the glass grew dim but he read on as if the passage of day into night was of no moment. The world was winding down, and young Bloodworth wound down with it. — William Gay

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. — William Gay