William Faulkner Quotes
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Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
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I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.
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When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
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To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.
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Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
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Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
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Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.
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I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
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She forced herself once more to think of nothing, to keep her consciousness immersed, as a little dog that one keeps under water until he has stopped struggling.
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We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
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I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie.
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If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green... If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.
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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
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War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
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That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
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You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
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Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
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The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
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You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
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A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.
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Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
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They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
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Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.