Key Quotes – As I Lay Dying

15 Jewel “It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill at their faces…
27 Dewey Dell …and then I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without words…
37 Anse (to Peabody) “I never sent for you,” I said. I take you to witness I never sent for you.”
42 Peabody …I knew that if it had finally occurred to Anse himself that he needed one [a doctor], it was already too late…
45 Peabody [Anse talking] “Hit aint begrudging the money,” he says
53 Vardaman I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands…
58 Dewey Dell He could do so much for me if he just would. [This is repeated in the chapter]
73 Tull The only burden Anse Bundren’s ever had is himself… folks talks him low
80-1 Darl [lots on subjectivity and existentialism] Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.
82 Cash I made it on the bevel
84 Vardaman My mother is a fish
88 Tull They had laid her in it reversed.
90 Tull [Cash talking about the coffin] “I made it to balance with her. I made it to her measure and weight.”
92 Tull “Wherever she went, she has her reward in being free of Anse Bundren”
94 Darl [Describing Jewel] He sits erect on the seat, leaning a little forward, wooden-backed.
95 Darl Jewel’s mother is a horse.
96 Cash It wont balance.
105 Anse I told him not to bring that horse out of respect for his dead ma,… her wanting us all to be in the wagon with her that sprung from her flesh and blood…
110 Anse It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off them that sweats.
135 Darl “IT’s all right,” Cash said. “He earned the money. He cleaned up that forty acres of new ground Quick laid out last spring. He did it single handed, working at night by lantern.”
135 Darl [Addie’s response to learning about Jewel’s horse buying] She cried hard, not hiding her face…
146 Darl “Let Jewel take the end of the rope and cross upstream of us and brace it,” I say. [Darl makes peace between Jewel and Cash]
151 Vardaman Then he comes up out of the water. He comes a long way up slow…
165 Cash It wasn’t on a balance. I told them that if they wanted it to tote and ride on a balance, they would have to
167 Cora [About Addie] …Brother Whitfield, a godly man if ever one breathed God’s breath, prayed for you...
167 Cora Darl that was touched by God Himself and considered queer by us mortals
168 Cora [Addie speaking] “He is my cross and he will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire. Even though I have laid down my life, he will save me.”
… I realised that she did not mean God.
171 Addie I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at.
171 Addie When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not.
172 Addie He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack
172 Addie My aloneness had been violated and then made whole again by the violation
173 Addie My revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge. And when Darl was born I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died…
173 Addie I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape…
173-4 Addie I would think how words go straight up in thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other;