“She just didn’t hope. Didn’t know how to begin to hope.
I imagine that after thirty years the machinery for hoping requires more than twenty-four hours to get started, to get into motion again…..

“And she was still groping, you see. She was still trying to find something which that mind which had apparently not run very much in thirty years, could believe in, admit to be actual, real. And I think that she found it there, at Hightower’s, for the first time: someone to whom she could tell it, who would listen to her. Very likely that was the first time she had ever told it. And very likely she learned it herself then for the first time, actually saw it whole and real at the same time with Hightower. “

–William Faulkner, The Light in August, Chapter 19