William Faulkner Quotes
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You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
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Who gathers the withered rose?
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When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.
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Truth; that long clean clear simple undeniable unchallengeable straight and shining line, on one side of which black is black and on the other white is white, has now become an angle, a point of view.
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It's because I'm alone.. If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.
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It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.
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No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
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We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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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.
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So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
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So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.
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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.
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I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
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It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
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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.
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Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.
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Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.
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I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.
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Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man.
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Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
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Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.
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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.
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A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
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...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.