quotes about love for him

Quotes From A Rose For Emily

Here are the top 99 quotes from “A Rose for Emily”:

1. “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town…”
2. “…we did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away…”
3. “So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily’s lawn and slunk about the house like burglars…”
4. “And as soon as the old people said, ‘Poor Emily,’ the whispering began. ‘Do you suppose it’s really so?'”
5. “She carried her head high enough—even when we believed that she was fallen.”
6. “Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair.”
7. “When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it.”
8. “Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.”
9. “It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons.”
10. “The Negro delivery boy brought her groceries and the druggist her medicines, but the more substantial they became, the more they receded.”
11. “It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness.”
12. “Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies’ magazines.”
13. “She was over forty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye-sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to look.”
14. “It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street.”
15. “So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.”
16. “Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.”
17. “…we were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off.”
18. “He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again.”
19. “…just as if a man—any man—could keep a kitchen properly.”
20. “…and the ladies all said, ‘Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.'”
21. “…handed her the tax notice, the new law requiring her to pave her sidewalks, and a summons from the health department.”
22. “We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.”
23. “…we did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away…”
24. “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.”
25. “…the kind of woman that would have killed a man herself if she had had the chance.”
26. “…and the Negro met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared.”
27. “…we had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.”
28. “…with no trace of grief on his face. He had a crayon portrait of Miss Emily’s father in a leather frame, which looked dusty.”
29. “…and then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.”
30. “…he was not the kind of man you would expect to see with a young woman.”
31. “…and the next day it was learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H.B. on each piece.”
32. “…the Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray.”
33. “…she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house.”
34. “…and a thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the man’s toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured.”
35. “…they were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow.”
36. “…the Negro led them into the dining room, where a long table with an oilcloth cover was set upon stiffly starched doilies and silver candlesticks…”
37. “…and the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talked of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”
38. “But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.”
39. “…when she grew up, she was still a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity.”
40. “…when the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray.”
41. “…and the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talked of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”
42. “But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.”
43. “…when she grew up, she was still a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity.”
44. “…the Negro had given a slip of paper to the teacher with the name of the deceased, Miss Emily Grierson.”
45. “Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister—Miss Emily’s people were Episcopal—to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again.”
46. “…when we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene.”
47. “…she looked bloated, like a body