Quotes from book
Go Down, Moses

Name: Go Down, Moses
Author: William Faulkner

William Faulkner

“This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares…. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

Delta Autumn (p. 347)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

“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?”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

The Bear section 4 (p. 247)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

“He recognised its voice. It was the young hound which even a year ago had had no judgment and which, by the lights of the other hounds anyway, still had none. Maybe that’s what courage is, he thought.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

The Bear section 3 (p. 229)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

“He was only ten. It seemed to him that he could see them, the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it. Because he recognised now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his own saliva, recognised fear as a boy, a youth recognises the existence of love and passion and experience which is his heritage but not yet his patrimony, from entering by chance the presence of perhaps even merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been loved by many men.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

The Bear section 1 (p. 195)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

“Dont you see?”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

he cried. “Dont you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse? Granted that my people brought the curse onto the land: maybe for that reason their descendants alone can—not resist it, not combat it—maybe just endure and outlast it until the curse is lifted. Then your peoples’ turn will come because we have forfeited ours. But not now. Not yet. Dont you see?”

The Bear section 4 (p. 266)
Go Down, Moses (1942)