William Faulkner Quotes
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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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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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We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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...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.
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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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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.
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Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
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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.
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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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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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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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Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.
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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.
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Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
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Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.
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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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People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do -after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.