“She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“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, quote from Twilight
“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.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“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, quote from Twilight
“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.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“There’s somethin about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There’s somethin about you, and I don’t know if it’s a great good or a great evil. Well. You being a witch and all, looks like you’d know. I would if you wadn’t blockin it out. You’re hidin somethin.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“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, quote from Twilight
“You might if you had a gun, he told Bookbinder. With his left hand the old man moved the shawl. It slid off his lap soundlessly onto the porch. He was holding trained on Sutter an enormous old dragoon revolver, and its hammer was thumbed back. It so surprised Sutter that he released his grip on the goat. When it jerked away and fled, Sutter looked down at the knife he was holding. It ain’t loaded, he said. I done a lot of foolish things in my life, Bookbinder said, but I ain’t never threatened to kill a man with a empty pistol.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“Lying there sleeping on the mossy concrete, his face jerking with the troubled passage of his dreams, he is provisionally still brother to all humankind. He has strayed far from the ways of men but there has always been a kind of twisted logic to his violence. The things he desired and struggled for made a kind of sense. Revenge, avarice, a thirst for power. The things only dreamed by normal men. Their own secret thoughts made carnate and ambulatory. Silver threads, thin and frayed though they be, hold him yet to the ways of the world.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“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, quote from Twilight
“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, quote from Twilight
“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, quote from Twilight
“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, quote from Twilight
“You buried my father, she began. He nodded unctuously. He couldn’t wonder what this was about. He remembered the girl, and he remembered the old man, but he couldn’t fathom what she wanted unless someone else was dead. He kept glancing at the purse, and he couldn’t remember if it had all been paid or not. Maybe she owed him money. Mann Tyler, she said. He had an insurance. We paid for an eight-hundred-dollar steel vault to go over his casket, and it’s not there anymore. The room was very quiet. She could hear rain at the window. Breece got up and crossed the room. He peereddown the hall and closed the door. He went back and sat down. His hands placed together atop the desk formed an arch. He was watching her and she could see sick fear rise up in his eyes. Just not there, she went on. And that’s not all. He’s buried without all the clothes we bought for him, and he’s been…mutilated. She just watched him. A tic pulsed at the corner of one bulging eye like something monstrous stirring beneath a thin veneer of flesh.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“There’s things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross em you got to take what comes.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“What always got me about him was the way he could just slide out of anything. Killin, burnin, sellin whiskey. He sold bootleg whiskey out of the front door of his house for fifteen year and never even got arrested. They used to worry old man Moose Tyler to death raidin him and finally did send him up to Brushy Mountain for a year or two. Yeah. And killin folks. He told me one time, said, it’s more people than Fenton Breece can bury somebody. Everbody knowed he killed Clyde Conkle in cold blood, but he never drawed a day for it.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“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, quote from Twilight
“There was more wickedness in the world than you thought and you’ve stirred it up and got it on you, ain’t ye?”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
“When Tyler fled and Sutter pursued him, this was the closest thing to a wilderness there was, and there was really no thought of going anywhere else, and as these fugitives, mentor and protégé, fled from a world that still adhered to form and order they were fleeing not only geographically but chronologically, for they were fleeing into the past.”
― William Gay, quote from Twilight
William Gay
Born place: in Hohenwald, Tennessee, The United States
Born date October 27, 1941
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“I’ve learned to just go ahead and take fairness out of the equation. If you do, things stand the chance of making a whole lot more sense.”
― Wiley Cash, quote from A Land More Kind Than Home
“Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off.”
― Lawrence Durrell, quote from Justine
“Anyway, what does mad mean exactly? Aren't we all a little mad? Don't we have to be somewhat mad just to go on living, to go on hoping?”
― Tabitha Suzuma, quote from A Note of Madness
“And then Lucy happened.
Never mind prophecies and bounty hunters, she was the one who'd really turned my life upside down.... She made everything better.
She was necessary.”
― Alyxandra Harvey, quote from Blood Moon
“Nunc fluens facit tempus,
nunc stans facit aeternitatum.
(The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity.)”
― Boethius, quote from The Consolation of Philosophy
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