As I Lay Dying Quotes

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.

The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

My mother is a fish.[repeated often in the rest of the book]

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.

If there is a God what the hell is He for.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

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; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.