William Faulkner Quotes - Page 2

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest
William Faulkner
What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.
William Faulkner
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...
William Faulkner
Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
William Faulkner
It is the man who all his life has been self-convicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
William Faulkner
I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner
It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.
William Faulkner
Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act.
William Faulkner
The razor hung between his shoulder-blades from a loop of cotton string round his neck inside his shirt. The same motion of the hand which brought the razor forward over his shoulder flipped the blade open and freed it from the cord, the blade opening on until the back edge of it lay across the knuckles of his fist, his thumb pressing the handle into his closing fingers, so that in the second before the half-drawn pistol exploded he actually struck at the white man's throat not with the blade but with a sweeping blow of his fist, following through in the same motion so that not even the first jet of blood touched his hand or arm.
William Faulkner
I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.
William Faulkner
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe."(on Mark Twain)
William Faulkner
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
William Faulkner
Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This--the actual pistols--was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.
William Faulkner
I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
William Faulkner
The orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs, with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered. "Catch it!" a voice shouted. They sprang forward, but the coffin crashed heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. "Play something!" the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; "play! Play!
William Faulkner
When it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get.
William Faulkner
I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
William Faulkner
At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that o
William Faulkner
Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar. Man the sum of his climatic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.
William Faulkner
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
William Faulkner
[B]ecause the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.
William Faulkner
People. They're really innately, inherently gentle and compassionate and kind. That's what wrings, wrenches...something. Your entrails, maybe. The member of the mob who holds up the whole ceremony for seconds or even minutes while he dislodges a family of bugs or lizards from the log he is about to put on the fire.
William Faulkner
It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.
William Faulkner
Memory believes before knowing remembers.[Light in August]
William Faulkner
If all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country town
William Faulkner
Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.
William Faulkner
Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.
William Faulkner
Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
William Faulkner
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.
William Faulkner
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
William Faulkner
The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
William Faulkner
Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
William Faulkner
It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.
William Faulkner
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
William Faulkner
My gad," one of them, warrant officer pilot, captain and M. C. in turn said to me once; "if you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all?
William Faulkner
All of us [writers] failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide. I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
William Faulkner
It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
William Faulkner
Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.
William Faulkner
Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.
William Faulkner
The American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife his child nor his country nor even his bank-account first (in fact he doesn't really love that bank-account nearly as much as foreigners like to think because he will spend almost any or all of it for almost anything provided it is valueless enough) but his motor-car. Because the automobile has become our national sex symbol. We cannot really enjoy anything unless we can go up an alley for it. Yet our whole background and raising and training forbids the sub rosa and surreptitious. So we have to divorce our wife today in order to remove from our mistress the odium of mistress in order to divorce our wife tomorrow in order to remove from our mistress and so on. As a result of which the American woman has become cold and and undersexed; she has projected her libido on to the automobile not only because its glitter and gadgets and mobility pander to her vanity and incapacity (because of the dress decreed upon her by the national retailers association) to walk but because it will not maul her and tousle her, get her all sweaty and disarranged. So in order to capture and master anything at all of her anymore the American man has got to make that car his own. Which is why let him live in a rented rathole though he must he will not only own one but renew it each year in pristine virginity, lending it to no one, letting no other hand ever know the last secret forever chaste forever wanton intimacy of its pedals and levers, having nowhere to go in it himself and even if he did he would not go where scratch or blemish might deface it, spending all Sunday morning washing and polishing and waxing it because in doing that he is caressing the body of the woman who has long since now denied him her bed.
William Faulkner
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
William Faulkner
Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.
William Faulkner
Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.
William Faulkner
There had been three of them once: James, then a sister named Fonsiba, then Lucas, children of Aunt Tomey's Turl, old Carother McCaslin's son, and Tennie Beauchamp, whom Edmonds' great-uncle Amodeus McCaslin won from a neighbor in a poker game in 1859. . .But James, the eldest, ran away before he became of age and didn't stop until he had crossed the Ohio River and they never heard from or of him again at all––that is, that his white kindred ever knew. It was as though he had not only. . .put running water between himself and the land of his grandmother's betrayal and his father's nameless birth, but he had interposed latitude and geography too, shaking from his feet forever the very dust of the land where his white ancestor could acknowledge or repudiate him from one day to another, according to his whim, but where he dared not even repudiate the white ancestor save when it met the white man's humor of the moment.
William Faulkner
It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
William Faulkner
Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.
William Faulkner
But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, going. "Wait," he said, talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: "Den lemme go wid you, honey." But she was going.
William Faulkner
Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.
William Faulkner
Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were.
William Faulkner
We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.
William Faulkner
It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.
William Faulkner
In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.
William Faulkner
In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, being an artist is an excuse for a form of behavior.
William Faulkner
In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That's why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it...
William Faulkner
Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.
William Faulkner
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
William Faulkner
You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.
William Faulkner
Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.
William Faulkner
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner
All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.
William Faulkner