I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And when I would have to look a… - William Faulkner

...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. That was it: cool; he was thinking, saying aloud to himself sometimes, “I better move. I better get away from here.”

But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.

It (the talking, the telling) seemed (to him, to Quentin) to partake of that logic- and reason-flouting quality of a dream which the sleeper knows must have occurred, stillborn and complete, in a second, yet the very quality upon which it must depend to move the dreamer (verisimilitude) to credulity _horror or pleasure or amazement_ depends as completely upon a formal recognition of and acceptance of elapsed and yet-elapsing time as music or a printed tale.

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.