Find the perfect quote to float your boat. Shmoop breaks down key quotations from As I Lay Dying.
Mortality Quotes
"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...
Family Quotes
"Eat," he says. "Get the goddamn stuff out of sight while you got a chance, you pussel-gutted bastard. You sweet son of a b****," he says. (3.12)
Suffering Quotes
I strike. I can hear the stick striking; I can see it hitting their heads, the breast-yoke, missing altogether sometimes as they rear and plunge, but I am glad. "You kilt my maw!" The stick breaks...
Women and Femininity Quotes
Then I would wait until they all went to sleep so I could lie with my shirt-tail up, hearing them asleep, feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing upon my parts and...
Religion Quotes
Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart. (2.5)
Duty Quotes
"She ought to taken them," Kate says. "But those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks cant" (2.4).
Versions of Reality Quotes
He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without words, and I knew he knew because if he had said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been...
Poverty Quotes
So when Miss Lawington told me about the cakes I thought that I could bake them and earn enough at one time to increase the net value of the flock the equivalent of two head. And that by saving the...