William Faulkner Quotes
-
I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness – people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
-
History is not was, it is.
-
We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
-
You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
-
That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.
-
Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.
-
I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.
-
In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
-
I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
-
So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice.
-
Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
-
No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
-
Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
-
Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.
-
They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
-
I am not one of those women who can stand things.
-
...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...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 of 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.
-
You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
-
I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
-
To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
-
Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.
-
It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.
-
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
-
Women ... to them any wedding is better than no wedding and a big wedding with a villain preferable to a small one with a saint.