William Faulkner Quotes
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If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time.
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Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?
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I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.
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People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
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Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you.
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I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized.
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People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
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The past is never dead. It's not even past.
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I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
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I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
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The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
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I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
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The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
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If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
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I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
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Our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere -- systems political or religious or racial or national -- will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.
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A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
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The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
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…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.
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I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
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It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.
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The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
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Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
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Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.