William Faulkner Quotes

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.
William Faulkner
One of the saddest things is the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day day after day is work. You can't eat 8 hours a day nor drink for 8 hours a day nor make love for 8 hours.
William Faulkner
The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful and it's best to take the gesture the shadow of the branch and let the mind create the tree.
William Faulkner
The past is never dead-it is not even past.
William Faulkner
When ideas come I write them when they don't come I don't.
William Faulkner
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
William Faulkner
The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business.
William Faulkner
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.
William Faulkner
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
William Faulkner
The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business.
William Faulkner
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.
William Faulkner
I decline to accept the end of men... I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner
Fear is the most damnable damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
William Faulkner
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
William Faulkner
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
William Faulkner
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
William Faulkner
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
William Faulkner
Too much happens ... Man performs engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
William Faulkner
I lied," I said. ..."I know it," he said."Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something.""I cant," he said."There aint anything to do? Not anything?""I didn't say that," Grandfather said. "I said I couldn't. You can.""What?" I said. "How can I forget it? Tell me how to.""You cant," he said. "Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable.""Then what can I do?""Live with it," Grandfather said."Live with it? You mean, forever? For the rest of my life? Not ever to get rid of it? Never? I cant. Dont you see that I cant?""Yes you can," he said. "You will. A gentleman always does. A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should.
William Faulkner
Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs
William Faulkner
Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.
William Faulkner
You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.
William Faulkner
The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless--a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer.
William Faulkner
Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago
William Faulkner
And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.
William Faulkner
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.
William Faulkner
The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
William Faulkner
He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."(on Ernest Hemingway
William Faulkner
Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing.
William Faulkner
Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.
William Faulkner
It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.
William Faulkner
Because you know that's all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me and run. I know you aint going to. Because all you got to beat is me. I got to beat old Carothers. Get your pistol.""No," the other said. "Go home. Get out of here. Tonight I will come to your house-----""After this?" Lucas said. "Me and you, in the same country, breathing the same air even? No matter what you could say, what you could even prove so I would have to believe it, after this? Get your pistol.
William Faulkner
And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it's like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.
William Faulkner
Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism--unless the criticized isn't within earshot.
William Faulkner
Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.
William Faulkner
Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.
William Faulkner
I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi
William Faulkner
But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.
William Faulkner
And so sometimes I would think how the devil had conquered God.
William Faulkner
I will never lie again.
William Faulkner
No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.
William Faulkner
It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.
William Faulkner
Listen: it’s got to be all honeymoon, always. Either heaven, or hell: no comfortable safe peaceful purgatory between for you and me to wait in until good behavior or forbearance or shame or repentance overtakes us.
William Faulkner
He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.
William Faulkner
I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
William Faulkner
Stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows.
William Faulkner
Wanton stars galloped neighing like unicorns in blue meadows.
William Faulkner
Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
William Faulkner
Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable----And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.
William Faulkner
now i can get them teeth
William Faulkner
And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
William Faulkner
So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice...
William Faulkner
...women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love ...
William Faulkner
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
William Faulkner
You know that if I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
William Faulkner
I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that's why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good cant. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad.
William Faulkner
... a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.
William Faulkner
Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.
William Faulkner