re: America's greatest literary critic about to release new book ranking authors

Faulkner, in my view, is by far the best on this list in terms of providing philosophical insights in his novels.

Addie Bundren's section in As I lay Dying is the finest chapter in all of American literature in this respect.

quote:

---

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had fear; pride, who never had the pride.

---

quote:

---

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.

---

quote:

---

we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swaying and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream.

---