Robin Toner’s article in tomorrow’s “Week in Review” section of the New York Times compares Kerry’s campaign with that of Michael Dukakis and concludes by observing:
The past, in other words, is never really dead in presidential campaigns. It’s not even past.
Those words, however, are not really “other”; they are William Faulkner’s probably most quoted line, from Act 1, Scene III, of Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
What, did you want him to footnote the whole article? Perhaps he (erroneously) assumed a level of cultural literacy that would assume familiarity.
Footnote? No. But an “As William Faulkner wrote…” might have been in order.
He probably doesn’t know who wrote it. It’s just something that he heard that sounded good and he used it. He’s probably so uneducated that he never heard of Faulkner.