William Faulkner Quotes
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The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.
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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.
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Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.
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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.
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Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.
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History is not was, it is.
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So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice.
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No one individual can tell the truth.
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In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
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This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
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And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.
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When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
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It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
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Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.
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You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
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A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
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I'm inclined to think that a military background wouldn't hurt anyone.
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Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
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Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
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The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.
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Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
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A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
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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.