Because women are marvellous. They stroll perfectly bland and serene through a fact that the men have been bloodying their heads against for years; w… - William Faulkner

...women are not interested in truth or romance but only in facts whether they are true or not, just so they fit all the other facts.

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.

On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.