William Gay Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

William Gay

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

William Gay

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. I just couldn't stand that goddamned yip yip yip.

William Gay

#16. 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