It's because she wants it told, he thought, so that people she will never see and whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read it and know at last why God let us lose the war: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth.

-William Faulkner - "Absalom, Absalom!"