The Wild Palms
First published 1939 · English · 317 pages
- Novels
- Love and romance
- Essays and criticism
A novel made of two alternating stories that never meet. In the first, a doctor and a married woman abandon their ordinary lives for love and drift across the country in search of freedom and money. In the second, a convict in the Mississippi flood of 1927 is sent out in a small boat to rescue a stranded pregnant woman. The pairing sets romantic passion against duty and endurance, and shows Faulkner moving beyond Yoknapatawpha into wider American settings.
Quotes
They say love dies between two people. That's wrong. It doesn't die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you are not good enough, worthy enough. It doesn't die; you're the one that dies.
...a mule will work for you ten years for the privilege of kicking you once.
... the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I had never actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the sum of love is what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.
... not sin, he thought, I don't believe in sin. It's getting out of timing. You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep with the teeming anonymous myriads of your time and generation; you get out of step once, falter once, and you are trampled to death.