It ain't never far to a bootlegger

“No move is the wrong move, What? Sometimes any move at all is better than nothin. If you're right, you're one up. If you're…

— William Gay

“don't start talkin about books or quotin poems at them. these is good folks but they ain't real crazy about readin books. just do…

— William Gay

“He stayed out of the house, he was much of the time in the woods, he felt like some animal half domesticated but ultimately…

— William Gay

“Even when he'd arrived he'd had restless eyes, eyes that were always looking about as if he might notice some place he'd rather be…

— William Gay

“Truth had hanged the way the landscape had changed to accommodate progress, altered by each generation to its purpose. He had learned from the…

— William Gay

“I thought you looked like a man with a bridge on fire, she said.”

— William Gay

“Julia Bradshaw was part Cherokee Indian. She was small and dark and the inscrutability of her eyes hinted at enigmas a man might unravel…

— William Gay

“After a while a three-quarter moon eased up over the treeline and the dusty road went white as milk, Rorshach patches of grass bleeding…

— William Gay

“Fleming doubted all this but he listened anyway and thought with a kind of sardonic amusement that before the night was over life itself…

— William Gay

“You don't learn that, she said. It's just there. It sounds like he spent his whole life trying to unlearn it. Trying to forget…

— William Gay

“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…

— William Gay

“Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was…

— William Gay

“Outside in the barnlot he looked up and the pale moon was directly over him and all-encompassing. It appeared to be lowering itself onto…

— William Gay

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

— William Gay

“He heard footsteps on the ice and just as someone pounded on the door death came swiftly into the trailer like a physical presence.…

— William Gay