Le Labrene

Words

I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forgot the words.

...because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

William Faulkner, As I lay dyng