William Faulkner Quotes
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The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
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There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
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Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.
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Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.
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True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
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Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
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I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
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It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible
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Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.
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I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.
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Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.
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He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
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Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.
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I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
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All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
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The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
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You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
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It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
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It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.
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Wonder. Go on and wonder.
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I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
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Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones.