Top 35 William Gay Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Times is always hard for some, the old man observed.”

— William Gay

2. “Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them. – CORMAC MCCARTHY, Child of God, 1973.”

— William Gay

3. “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

4. “But blood is never left up to you, blood will call to blood. You can’t deny your own kin.”

— William Gay

5. “You get a picture of things in your head and your picture is all you see. You don’t know me. You don’t even know yourself. All you know is your little picture of how things ought to be, and that’s the way you think they are.”

— William Gay

6. “Songs about death and lost love and rambling down the line because sometimes down the line was the only place left.”

— William Gay

7. “As night deepened all he could see was the shifting line of fire, like some malfunction in the wiring of the world itself, as if the very night had combusted and was creeping incrementally toward him.”

— William Gay

8. “For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first.”

— William Gay

9. “It was a place if not hell then certainly the room across the hall from it.”

— William Gay

10. “I have a lot of books and books are better if you can share them.”

— William Gay

11. “He seemed to be drawing inward toward some point at which he would be reduced to the fundamental essence of himself.”

— William Gay

12. “There was something oddly restful about the fireflies. He couldn’t put his finger on it but he drew comfort from it anyway. The way they’d seemed not separate entities but a single being, a moving river of light that flowed above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night.”

— William Gay

13. “He was wishing the past was a place you could backtrack to, take a sideroad you’d walked hurriedly past, wake somebody from a bad dream he was having.”

— William Gay

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Hovington cowered on the porch alternately praying and swearing in a desperate attempt to cover all the bases.”

— William Gay

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

— William Gay

18. “The cornfield seemed darker toward its center. Light entered at the rows’ end, ran like liquid down the middles, getting shallower and shallower. There seemed at the convergence of the rows some mass of shadows light could not defray.”

— William Gay

19. “Binder, in his youth, had always been interested in the supernatural, had felt some deep and nameless affinity for the questions that did not have any answers.”

— William Gay

20. “Two, it seemed, could not live nearly as cheaply as one, especially if that one had been accustomed to subsisting on whatever fell to hand, spending what little money he did have in secondhand bookstores.”

— William Gay

21. “She looked at him fondly. You won’t never make much of a liar, she said. I can see right through you like lookin down into still water. I expect law and politics is goin to be out of your reach.”

— William Gay

22. “They trickled down sunless corridors and burst capillaries until they were in the city’s dark heart. A city within a city where the blood slowed and thickened and clotted in viscous smears of alizarin crimson dried to burnt sienna around the edges.”

— William Gay

23. “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

24. “What he wanted, he had realized in the last few minutes, was everything. He wanted the rest of her life, and failing that, he wanted permission to walk along beside her while she lived it.”

— William Gay

25. “Her quickened breath was the very affirmation of life.”

— William Gay

26. “He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages. He felt the ways of men fall from him like sundered shackles.”

— William Gay

27. “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

28. “He was seized with longing so intense it ached in his chest, he wanted it always to keep, to drag out secretly and study it like a yellowed photograph, and he thought I am home, this is me, this is where I have been rambling down to all these years.”

— William Gay

29. “From a high point of cupping the breast of the prettiest girl in a three-county area things could only go downhill...”

— William Gay

30. “Folks called this place haunted, felt the emanations of an unspeakable act moving outward like ripples on water.”

— William Gay

31. “He had no faith in the permanence of any of this. What he’d seen of life had shown him that the world had little of comfort or assurance. He suspected that there were no givens, no map through the maze. Here in falling dark with the world rolling simultaneously toward him and away from him everything seemed no more than random. 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

32. “He was driving into a world where the owls roosted with the chickens, where folks kept whippoorwills for pets and didn’t get the Saturday Night Opry till Monday morning.”

— William Gay

33. “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

34. “He was continually called upon to explain himself and day by day it had grown harder so that by now there didn’t seem to be any words, the right phrases hadn’t been coined yet.”

— William Gay

35. “For the first time in his life he realized that sometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.”

— William Gay