I made it on the bevel.

1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.
2. There is twice the gripping-surface on each seam.
3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant.  Water moves easiest up and down or straight across.
4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time.  So the seams and joins are made up-and-down.  Because the stress is up-and-down.
5. In a bed where people lie down all the time, the joints and seams are made sideways, because the stress is sideways.
6. Except.
7. A body is not square like a crosstie.
8. Animal magnetism.
9. The animal magnetism of a dead body makes the stress come slanting, so the seams and joints of a coffin are made on the bevel.
10. You can see by an old grave that the earth sinks down on the bevel.
11. While in a natural hole it sinks by the center, the stress being up-and-down.
12. So I made it on the bevel.
13. It makes a neater job.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

The moonlight dappled on him too.  On her it was still, but on Darl it dappled up and down.
“You needn’t to cry,” I said.  “Jewel got her out.  You needn’t to cry, Darl.”
The barn is still red.  It used to be redder than this.  Then it went swirling, making the stars run backward without falling.  It hurt my heart like the train did.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Then the four of them—Cash and pa and Vernon and Peabody—raise the coffin to their shoulders and turn toward the house.  It is light, yet they move slowly; empty, yet they carry it carefully; lifeless, yet they move with hushed precautionary words to one another, speaking of it as though, complete, it now slumbered lightly alive, waiting to come awake.  On the dark floor their feet clump awkwardly, as though for a long time they have not walked on floors.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way.  It’s like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it’s the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside.  But now it was like we had all—and by a kind of telepathic agreement of admitted fear—flung the whole thing back like covers on the bed and we all sitting bolt upright in our nakedness, staring at one another and saying “Now is the truth.  He hasn’t come home.  Something has happened to him.  We let something happen to him.”

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

That’s what he was trying to say.  When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

And at times when I went in to go to bed she would be sitting in the dark by Jewel where he was asleep.  And I knew that she was hating herself for that deceit and hating Jewel because she had to love him so that she had to act the deceit.

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying