Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all. - William Faulkner

"She’s a-going," he says. "Her mind is set on it." It’s a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy or more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night-gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. "You all will have to look out for pa the best you can," she said. "I’m tired."

Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.