Jasmine Martin > Jasmine's Quotes

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

“The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.”
― William Faulkner

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”
― William Faulkner

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
― William C. Faulkner

“Wonder. Go on and wonder.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”
― William Faulkner

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
― William Faulkner

“She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.”
― William Faulkner, The Town

“Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.”
― William Faulkner

“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
― 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

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”
― William Faulkner

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”
― William Faulkner

“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.”
― William Faulkner

“Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest”
― William Faulkner

“You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.”
― William C. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.”
― William Faulkner

“We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.”
― William Faulkner

“...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“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

“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”
― William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

“I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.”
― 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