How we cite our quotes: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Monday is no different from any other weekday in Jefferson now. [...] even the Negro women who still take in white people's washing after the old custom, fetch and deliver it in automobiles. 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 [...] Nancy would set her bundle on the top of her head. (1.1-3)
The introduction to the story illustrates how memory drifts by association from topic to topic. The mind often travels from one topic to a second one that's associated with the first in some way, and then moves from the second topic to a third associated topic, and keeps going and going until you decide to strop strolling down memory lane. Here, Quentin moves from the present Monday, to Monday fifteen years ago, to black women carrying laundry bundles on their heads, to a specific woman, Nancy, doing so—and if you keep reading, he keeps remembering via association for quite a while.
Quote #2
"What is it?" I said. "What is it?" "I ain't nothing but a n*****," Nancy said. "It ain't none of my fault." She looked at me, sitting in the chair before the cold stove, the sailor hat on her head. I went back to the library. It was the cold stove and all, when you think of a kitchen being warm and busy and cheerful. And with a cold stove and the dishes all put away, and nobody wanting to eat at that hour. (1.28-30)
This is a bit of a difficult passage. You see, the adult Quentin who is narrating this story is, as he's remembering, presenting most of it from his nine-year-old perspective. But here he feels empathy for Nancy: " What is it?" I said. " What is it?" —while other characters ignore her feelings. But he still hasn't come to terms with the way his family treated her plight with indifference, the way they contrasted with him. The adult Quentin chalks up his leaving the kitchen not to the discomfort he must have felt as a child at her despair—"It ain't none of my fault" —and instead says (essentially) "Oh, you know, the kitchen was cold and kind of sad and stuff… that's why I left." The point is that memory plays tricks on you. Quentin is remembering the past, but he doesn't quite want to process or re-experience what truly happened at this moment.
Quote #3
"I didn't," Jason said. "I didn't have any fun."
"You were asleep in mother's room," Caddy said. "You were not there." (3.22-23)
So who's right, Jason or Caddy? We can't tell. Each is remembering things a different way, it seems, perhaps influenced by what they wish were true. Memory dupes us, and Modernists such as Faulkner love to point out how that happens.