'If it had been this hard to do before, I reckon I would not be doing it now,' she thought.
"I reckon you better buy it," Winterbottom said. "It sounds like a bargain."
And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man's name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time.
"Well, you have told God's truth for once in your life," Mooney said.
In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.
"No, ma'am," Byron says. He pauses, half turning with the balanced staves. "I dont reckon I am. Who is it I aint?"
"I dont know of any here by that name," Byron says. "I dont recall none named Burch except me, and my name is Bunch."
Yet Byron can see in the other's face something latent, about to wake, of which Hightower himself is unaware, as if something inside the man were trying to warn or prepare him. But Byron thinks that this is just the reflection of what he himself already knows and is about to tell.
And he said how if she could just have done that when she was alive, she might not have been doing it now.
To his left lay the square, the clustered lights: low bright birds in stillwinged and tremulous suspension.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears.
On the third day she came out of the coma state, the waking sleep through which during the hours of light and faces she carried her own face like an aching mask in a fixed grimace of dissimulation that dared not flag.
He was a hard man, in his prime; a man who should have been living a hard and active life, and whom time, circumstance, something, had betrayed, sweeping the hale body and thinking of a man of fortyfive into a backwater suitable for a man of sixty or sixtyfive.
They trampled and swayed, striking at whatever hand or body touched, until they all went down in a mass, he underneath.
But to admit that they did not know the latter would be to admit that they had not discovered the former.
It moved them: the temporary and abject helplessness of that which tantalised and frustrated desire; the smooth and superior shape in which volition dwelled doomed to be at stated and inescapable intervals victims of periodical filth.
But even then he did not even know that he had not known what to expect to see.
Even when at night, in her dark bedroom, she insisted on telling him in tedious detail the trivial matters of her day and insisted on his telling her of his day in turn, it was in the fashion of lovers: that imperious and insatiable demand that the trivial details of both days be put into words, without any need to listen to the telling.
It was summer becoming fall, with already, like shadows before a westering sun, the chill and implacable import of autumn cast ahead upon summer; something of dying summer spurting again like a dying coal, in the fall.
'I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice'
It went here and there about the town, dying and borning again like a wind or a fire until in the lengthening shadows the country people began to depart in wagons and dusty cars and the townspeople began to move supperward.