Faulkner Quotes

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible. ~ William Faulkner

When it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get. ~ William Faulkner

I like to keep some privacy, be a normal person. ~ Judith R. Faulkner

Do you read them? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald?"
"Only if I have to. I try to avoid old dead white men. ~ John Grisham

You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear. ~ William Faulkner

Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music. ~ William Faulkner

Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity. ~ William Faulkner

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation. ~ William Faulkner

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash. ~ William Faulkner

But then, poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
No: that's wrong. It's because you dont dare to hope, you are afraid to hope. Not afraid of the extent of hope of which you are capable, but that you - the frail web of bone and flesh snaring that fragile temeritous boundless aspirant sleepless with dream and hope - cannot match it; as Ratliff would say, Knowing always you wont never be man enough to do the harm and damage you would do if you were just man enough. - and, he might add, or maybe I do it for him, thank God for it. Ay, thank God for it or thank anything else for it that will give you any peace after it's too late; peace in which to coddle that frail web and its unsleeping ensnared anguish both on your knee and whisper to it: There, there, it's all right; I know you are brave. ~ William Faulkner

When you opened the door a bell tinkled, but just once, high and clear and small in the neat obscurity above the door, as though it were gauged and tempered to make that single clear small sound so as not to wear the bell out nor to require the expenditure of too much silence in restoring it when the door opened upon the recent warm scent of baking; a little dirty child with eyes like a toy bear's and two patent-leather pigtails. ~ William Faulkner

In the notseeing and the hardknowing as though in a cave he seemed to see a diminishing row of suavely shaped urns in moonlight, blanched. ~ William Faulkner

In writing, you must kill your darlings. ~ William Faulkner

They killed us, but they ain't whooped us yet. ~ William Faulkner

But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. ~ William Faulkner

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God. ~ William Faulkner

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find. ~ William Faulkner

But my mother is a fish. Vernon seen it. He was there.
"Jewel's mother is a horse," Darl said.
"Then mine can be a fish, can't it, Darl? I said.
Jewel is my brother.
"Then mine will have to be a horse, too," I said.
"Why? Darl said. "If pa is your pa, why does your ma have to be a horse just because Jewel's is?"
"Why does it? I said. "Why does it, Darl?"
Darl is my brother.
"Then what is your ma, Darl?" I said.
"I haven't got ere one," Darl said. "Because If I had one, it is was. And if it is was, it can't be is. Can't it?"
"No," I said.
"Then I am not," Darl said. "Am I?"
"No," I said.
I am. Darl is my brother.
"But you are, Darl," I said.
"I know it," Darl said. "That's why I am not is. Are is too many for one woman to foal. ~ William Faulkner

Thinking remembering how his uncle had said that all man had was time, all that stood between him and the death he feared and abhorred was time yet he spent half of it inventing ways of getting the other half past: ~ William Faulkner

Again. Sadder than was. Again. Saddest of all. Again. ~ William Faulkner

But then you left exactly how all the sad songs said you would ~ Andrew Faulkner

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And ~ William Faulkner

From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn) of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask. The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south again as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long. ~ William Faulkner

Only her eyes seem to move. It's like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been there. ~ William Faulkner

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior. ~ William Faulkner

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond. ~ William Faulkner

No man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters. ~ William Faulkner

There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate has accepted but which digestion cannot compass _occurences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish; are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless; fixed, until we can die. ~ William Faulkner

It takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you are losing, ~ William Faulkner

Caddy smelled like trees. ~ William Faulkner

Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking or fleeing it. Loved her brother despite him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family's honor and its doom, as he thought he loved but really hated in her what he considered the frail doomed vessel of its pride and the foul instrument of its disgrace, not only this, she loved him not only in spite of but because of the fact that he himself was incapable of love, accepting the fact that he must value above all not her but the virginity of which she was custodian and on which she placed no value whatever: the frail physical stricture which to her was no more than a hangnail would have been. Knew the brother loved death best of all and was not jealous, would (and perhaps in the calculation and deliberation of her marriage did) have handed him the hypothetical hemlock. Was two months pregnant with another man's child which regardless of what its sex would be she had already named Quentin after the brother whom they both (she and her brother) knew was already the same as dead... ~ William Faulkner

The writer in America isn't part of the culture of this country. He's like a fine dog. People like him around, but he's of no use. ~ William Faulkner

All that any man can hope for is to be permitted to live quietly among his fellows [ ... ] a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. ~ William Faulkner

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle. ~ William Faulkner

So that's it," he said. "Three hundred dollars. I wish somebody would come into this country with a seed that had to be worked everyday from New Year's right on through Christmas. As soon as you niggers are laid-by, trouble starts. ~ William Faulkner

[...] confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever touches. ~ William Faulkner

I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy man. ~ William Faulkner

Nevermind nomenclatures, boy! What a serendipitous situation this is! ~ T.T. Faulkner

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
(on Ernest Hemingway ~ William Faulkner

There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need. ~ William Faulkner

The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true. ~ William Faulkner

I can't say that winning the Pen/Faulkner was a dream come true because I would never have dared to dream it. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much so is this that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape. ~ William Faulkner

We can't slow up because of our love for democracy and our love for America. Someone should tell Faulkner that the vast majority of the people on this globe are colored. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells. ~ William Faulkner

Lifeless and shockingly alien in that place where dissolution itself was a seething turmoil of ejaculation tumescence conception and birth, and death did not even exit. ~ William Faulkner

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. ~ William Faulkner

...Father said you swallow like you had a fishbone in your throat... ~ William Faulkner

Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again. ~ William Faulkner

They come into white people's lives like that in sudden sharp black trickles that isolate white facts for an instant in unarguable truth like under a microscope; the rest of the time just voices that laugh when you see nothing to laugh at, tears when no reason for tears. They will bet on the odd or even number of mourners at a funeral. A brothel full of them in Memphis went into a religious trance ran naked into the street. It took three policemen to subdue one of them. Yes Jesus O good man Jesus O that good man. The ~ William Faulkner

The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning. ~ William Faulkner

It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand. ~ William Faulkner

The logic behind magic is that we create what we are imagining. ~ Mary Faulkner

Every writer must learn to kill his little darlings. ~ William Faulkner

Your outside is just what you live in, sleep in, and has little connection with who you are and even less with what you do. ~ William Faulkner

She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words. ~ William Faulkner

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. ~ William Faulkner

If you got something outside the common run that's got to be done and cant wait, dont waste your time on the menfolks; they works on what your uncle calls the rules and the cases. Get the womens and the children at it; they works on the circumstances. ~ William Faulkner

He puts his shoes on, stomping into them, like he does everything, like he is hoping all the time he really cant do it and can quit trying to. ~ William Faulkner

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner. ~ Louise Erdrich

The grass was buzzing in the moonlight where my shadow walked on the grass. ~ William Faulkner

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it. ~ William Faulkner

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. ~ William Faulkner

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. ~ William Faulkner

My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don't have time for any of that Hamlet jive -- but Marvel superheroes are super cool. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it. ~ William Faulkner

If a story is in you, it has got to come out. ~ William Faulkner

But always beyond seas, and there was no body to be returned clumsily to earth, and so to her he seemed still to be laughing at that word as he had laughed at all other mouthsounds that stood for repose, who had not waited for Time and its furniture to teach him that the end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Aunt Sally rocked steadily in her chair. ~ William Faulkner

because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted. ~ Ralph Ellison

And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time. ~ William Faulkner

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. ~ William Faulkner

Probably by that time he had learned that there were three things and no more: breathing, pleasure, darkness; and without money there could be no pleasure, and without pleasure it would not even be breathing but mere protoplasmic inhale and collapse of blind unorganism in a darkness where light never began. ~ William Faulkner

I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it. ~ William Faulkner

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. ~ William Faulkner

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station ... . ~ William Faulkner

Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash. ~ William Faulkner

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky. ~ William Faulkner

By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit. ~ William Faulkner

There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp. ~ William Faulkner

Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature
match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P.G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here ... he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes.
(Hornby's thoughts after reading "Enemies of Promise" by Cyril Connolly) ~ Nick Hornby

I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that's why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good cant. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad. ~ William Faulkner

This world is not his world; this life his life. ~ William Faulkner

The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing - the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back. ~ William Faulkner

She has had a hard life, but so does every woman. ~ William Faulkner

[The] Christ story is one of the best stories that man has invented ...
Faulkner in the University, 117 ~ William Faulkner

People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy. ~ William Faulkner

Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative. ~ Barry Lopez

Then she too seemed to blow out of his life on the long wind like a third scrap of paper. ~ William Faulkner

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down. ~ William Faulkner

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. ~ William Faulkner

Like Hemingway and Faulkner, but in an entirely different mode, Fitzgerald had that singular quality without which a writer is not really a writer at all, and that is a voice, a distinct and identifiable voice. This is really not the same thing as a style; a style can be emulated, a voice cannot, and the witty, rueful, elegaic voice gives his work its bright authenticity. ~ William Styron

God is foolish at times, but at least He's a gentleman. Dont you know that?" "I always thought of Him as a man," the woman said. ~ William Faulkner

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism. ~ William Faulkner

The salvation of the world is in man's suffering. ~ William Faulkner

Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness. ~ William Faulkner

I could hear my watch whenever the car stopped, but not often they were already eating Who would play a Eating the business of eating inside of you space too space and time confused Stomach saying noon brain saying eat o clock All right I wonder what time it is what of it. ~ William Faulkner

You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do you. ~ William Faulkner

All cat remember the jungle. ~ Karin Faulkner

Hush, now", she said, stroking his head. "Hush. Dilsey got you." But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sound. ~ William Faulkner

Just by imagining the clump it seemed to me that I could hear whispers secret surges smell the beating of hot blood under wild unsecret flesh watching against red eyelids the swine untethered in pairs rushing coupled into the sea and he we must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while its not always and i it doesnt have to be even that long for a man of courage and he do you consider that courage and i yes sir dont you and he every man is the arbiter of his own virtues whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself than any act otherwise you could not be in earnest and i you dont believe i am serious and he i think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm you wouldnt have felt driven to the expedient of telling me you had committed incest otherwise and i i wasnt lying i wasnt lying and he you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth ~ William Faulkner