Свет в августе. Деревушка. Осквернитель праха

. ‘Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,’ he thought quietly. ‘Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.’

‘So this is love. I see. I was wrong about it too,’ thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

‘It seems like a man can just about bear anything. He can even bear what he never done. He can even bear the thinking how some things is just more than he can bear. He can even bear it that if he could just give down and cry, he wouldn’t do it. He can even bear it to not look back, even when he knows that looking back or not looking back won’t do him any good.’

You men,” she said. “It ain’t a wonder womenfolks get impatient with you. You can’t even know your own limits for devilment.

“I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that can’t deny the bill when it comes around.

He lives dissociated from mechanical time. Yet for that reason he has never lost it. It is as though out of his subconscious he produces without volition the few crystallizations of stated instances by which his dead life in the actual world had been governed and ordered once.

“There are secret things a man can do without being evil, Reverend. No matter how they might look to folks.”
“I don’t think that you could do anything that would be very evil, Byron, no matter how it looked to folks. But are you going to undertake to say just how far evil extends into the appearance of evil? just where between doing and appearing evil stops?”

“You don’t need my help. You are already being helped by someone stronger than I am.”
For a moment Byron does not speak. They look at one another, steadily. “Helped by who?”
“By the devil,” Hightower says.

‘It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.’