Faulkner, being a Nobel Prize winner for literature and all, writes some pretty dazzling prose. Emphatic is our first descriptor: imagine some towering granite statue taking thundering steps across an echoing stage, because that's how hard some of Faulkner's sentences come down. Take a look at this passage:
She came and sat in a chair before the hearth. There was a little fire there. Nancy built it up, when it was already hot inside. She built a good blaze. She told a story. (3.63)
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
It's also pretty paradoxical: we get contradictions in Faulkner that seem to add meaning rather than cancel it. For example, Nancy's wailing is described as "like singing and it wasn't like singing" (2.2) or "not singing and not unsinging" (3.18). Whatever sound it is that she's making—we choose to call it wailing—that is singing yet not singing, it seems to come from a place beyond true or false, beyond yes or no. That gives it even more power.
The masterful prose varies things up. Sometimes Faulkner gives us short sentences that zip the story along. For example:
Then we came to her house. We were going fast then. She opened the door. (3.49)
It's as if he's telling us, "Just the facts, ma'am."
At other times, he gives us long, winding sentences that feel more pensive and thoughtful. The purpose of these is often to give us a big picture, panoramic view of time, history, and memory. For example, look at the long second paragraph of the story, itself a single sentence:
But fifteen years ago, on Monday morning the quiet, dusty, shady streets would be full of Negro women with, balanced on their steady, turbaned heads, bundles of clothes tied up in sheets, almost as large as cotton bales, carried so without touch of hand between the kitchen door of the white house and the blackened washpot beside a cabin door in Negro Hollow. (1.1)
That's Quentin stretching back into his memory, and Faulkner lengthening the sentence to underline the flexible quality of remembrance.