William Faulkner Quotes
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God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.
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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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A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
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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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War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
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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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Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
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Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
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In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That's why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it.
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It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.
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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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Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
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It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.
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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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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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Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.
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We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.
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Only when the clock stops does time come to life.
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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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Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you.
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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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Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
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In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.
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Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.