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Fiction

Epigraph from Mosquitoes

William Faulkner
25 April 2026
Originally Published 2 April 1927
188 Words
1 Min Read
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25 April 2026

In spring, the sweet young spring, decked out with little green, necklaced, braceleted with the song of idiotic birds, spurious and sweet and tawdry as a shopgirl in her cheap finery, like an idiot with money and no taste; they were little and young and trusting, you could kill them sometimes. But now, as August like a languorous replete bird winged slowly through the pale summer toward the moon of decay and death, they were bigger, vicious; ubiquitous as undertakers, cunning as pawnbrokers, confident and unavoidable as politicians. They came cityward lustful as country boys, as passionately integral as a college football squad; pervading and monstrous but without majesty: a biblical plague seen through the wrong end of a binocular: the majesty of Fate become contemptuous through ubiquity and sheer repetition.

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William Faulkner’s second novel, Mosquitoes, was first published by Boni & Liveright, New York, April 1927.

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Epigraph from Mosquitoes by William Faulkner | Soft Union