When Faulkner states that "the past is a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches", he uses two very important literary resources.
The first of it is the symbolism when he says that the past is a meadow. In real life, the past, which is intangible, could never be a meadow. First of all, because a meadow is tangible, and then because the past is a stage in our lives, while a meadow is a geographic feature.
The second literary resource is personalisation. He uses it when he infers that winter has the ability of touching things or people. In this case he specifies that it can't touch the past, with which he implies that winter has such human ability.
