Absalom, Absalom! All

"I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings" (302).

(subtractive logic of killing)

"Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool...it doesn't matter: that pebble's water echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space" (210)

"you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying r having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it...And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something—a scrap of paper—something, anything...at least it would be something just because it would have happened...something that might make a mark on something that was once fore the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish" (101).

"It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know...They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest...almost indecipherable, yet meaningful...you re-read, tedious and intent...you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols" (80)