Literature quote - along the lines of "life is just a struggle between nothing and no one":

"When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again,hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

Someone's explanation:
https://dumb.ducks.party/William-faulkner-excerpt-from-the-sound-and-the-fury-june-2nd-1910-annotated

which includes:
>> it's rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience
> The correct Latin phrase is reductio ad absurdum,“reduced to absurdity.” The phrase refers to a classical rhetorical mode of refutation, by which one shows that another’s arguments, if followed far enough, lead to an absurd conclusion. To Mr Compson, time reduces human experience to absurdity because all life concludes with death.The incorrect phrasing may be a joke on either Mr Compson’s or Quentin’s part; or along with the hyphen in “excruciating-ly, ” the mis-stated Latin could hint that Quentin remembers Mr Compson as drunk and not in full command of his words. (A Faulkner Glossary) Mister Compson is not simply passing along the watch, he is passing on a piece of the family, an symbolic heirloom. But he is also passing on the burden of the family, the fatalism and despair at the loss of a culture in a war that was cursed by the horror of slavery. The price for the sin of slavery is to never again regain fully the honor of the old society and to bear the weight and guilt of all that that entails. In a narrow sense Faulkner’s work is a eulogy of the Old South. A coming to terms with what that means – what the South could have been but also at the same time, paradoxically, could never have been. It is a form of psychosis. Madness. To lose your way of life in a war in any moral or spiritual sense you were unquestionably on the wrong side of can cause insanity. As his father does, so does Quentin. The final line of Absalom Absalom! is spoken by Quentin though it could be a summation of Faulkner’s portrayal of the Southern male complex. He says, “I don’t hate the South. I don’t hate it.” Even Southern man at this late of date with some maturity arrive at that conclusion. They can’t love the South, embrace everything it stands for and stood for, but they don’t hate it.