`` I mean, we don't have any way to get there and we can't expect you to quit work just to take us to town ''.

I just can't take any chances on getting her pregnant, and if we were sleeping together ''

I was at once disappointed, although just what I had expected him to look like I could not have explained.

I just do what I'm told, and '' --

I was just doing my job, just following orders, and for that he's going to kill me.

But there's one thing I never seen or heard of, one thing I just don't think there is, and that's a sportin' way o' killin' a man ''!!

I just want you to take a message to Diane Molinari.

Couldn't I just '' -- His voice trailed off into silence.

I just wanted to hear you say so ''.

I seized the rack and made a western-style flying-mount just in time, one of my knees mercifully landing on my duffel bag -- and merely wrecking my camera, I was to discover later -- my other knee landing on the slivery truck floor boards and -- but this is no medical report.

I ducked just as the first strand broke somewhere down the line and came whipping over the sideboards.

I saw Johnson's bottle snatched from his hand, saw it go in a swirl of foam just behind the second car.

`` So I just scooted out of his clutches.

I was so scared well, I just ran to my car and came here ''.

I didn't get a good look at him at all, his back was to me, and I was so scared It was just somebody in a man's suit.

The rest of the time I devoted to painting or to those other activities a young and healthy man just out of college finds interesting.

If you tell him I made a pass at you he might think you misunderstood something I said or did, so instead of just telling him I made a pass, say I tried to date you and that you agreed so you could prove to him what a louse I really am.

`` I never felt better in my life '', Fiske blustered.

I would turn away from my writing in the hope of getting a good look at them but I never quite succeeded.

) hung on a hook on the wall, and underneath it I could see his tie, knotted, ready to be slipped over his head, a black badge of frayed respectability that ought never to have left his neck.

For weeks I wandered about this neighborhood of warehouses and garages, truck terminals and taxi repair shops, gasoline pumps and longshoremen's lunch counters, yet never did I cease to feel myself a stranger there.

`` I never saw him.

I never wear anything at all.

`` No, I never did see his face.

I can never pronounce it ''.

Though I had a great dread of the island and felt I would never leave it alive, I eagerly wrote down everything she told me about its women.

Never, never did I offer him the exclusive rights.

`` I never heard that ''.

I never heard of a poll being taken on the question.

`` As an independent American I considered all who were not for us, and you amongst the rest, as against us, yet be assured that John Jay never ceased to be the friend of Peter Van Schaack ''.

His first inaugural address speaks of `` my country whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love ''.

But I would never have thought of it myself ''.

Then, after overtures to accept a settlement and go through with a divorce, Miriam gave a ghastly echo of Mrs. Micawber by suddenly stating, `` I will never leave Mr. Wright ''.

From her California headquarters, Miriam fired back, `` I shall never divorce Mr. Wright, to permit him to marry Olga Milanoff ''.

), I have never wanted to know what you knew of passion.

You probably would not remember, since you never seemed to remember even the same moments as I, much less their intensity, one sunny midday on Fifth Avenue when you had set out with me for some final shopping less than a week before the wedding you staged for me with such reluctance at the Farm.

My God, how long is he going to wait, I thought.

At first I thought he had missed.

`` I thought I told you to stay home ''.

The way his red rubber lips were stretched across his pearly little teeth I thought he was only having a little joke, but, no, he wanted me to bend down from the roar of wind so he could roar something into my ear.

You thought I was a Mexican, didn't you, buddy ''??

Suddenly and not a second too soon I thought of the coins in my pocket.

Maybe Lou was only unconscious, but right then I thought he must be dead.

I thought I saw a faint surge of color rise to her neck and quickly suffuse her cheeks.

At first, I thought he was out of his head, talking wildly like this.

Ramey smiled but he thought to himself, I always see me too.

`` When I came up, damnit, I thought I was going down.

But when it happens to you like that, I tell you, and you're a hundred feet from where you thought you were -- well, it makes you think.

That, I thought, is at least one thing I can find out when we meet.

I used his polarity to illustrate what I thought had happened to us in that form of liberalism we call Progressivism.

`` I hated the war '', he said, `` but thought I ought to go because I was, perhaps, one of those who hadn't done enough to prevent it ''.

It would be profitable, I believe, to read these realistic humorists alongside Faulkner's works, the thought being not that he necessarily read them and owed anything to them directly, but rather that they dealt a hundred years ago with a class of people and a type of life which have continued down to our time, to Faulkner's time.