Michael Gorra > Quotes

“James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” (1953) describes a winter’s stay in an isolated Swiss hamlet called Leukerbad. I have known that essay almost as long as I’ve known Faulkner’s own work, and I never reread it without a sense of profound discomfort, an uneasiness with American life and my own cushioned place within it.”
― Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War

“Absalom, Absalom! uses the fractured mind of a boy who seems already half-ghost to present the family history of “the son who widowed the daughter who had not yet been a bride.” No one can read it quickly or even entirely with pleasure, but anyone who can hear its flowered dissonance will know that such books are why we read at all.”
― Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War

“For the history of our shared country, he argues, is the history of the way white people have tried both to recognize and to deny the humanity of their black neighbors.”
― Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War

“That’s how it is in Faulkner’s South: a land where the dead past walks, not was but is, and burning always in one’s mind.”
― Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War