It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you… - William Faulkner

Dilsey stroked Ben's lower head, slowly and steadily, smoothing the bang upon his brow. He wailed quietly, unhurriedly. "Hush," Dilsey said. "Hush, now. We be gone in a minute. Hush, now." He wailed quietly and steadily.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

He just thought quietly, '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. [...] 'Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,' he thought quietly. 'Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.