Scott Brillon > Scott's Quotes

“Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and other stories

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.”
― Justin Cronin, The Passage

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Because love is never in the past tense.”
― Scott D Brillon

“The world was a shitty enough place without having to miss everyone you love all the damn time.”
― Scott D Brillon

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― 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

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

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

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

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

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

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.”
― William Faulkner

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

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. 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.”
― William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.”
― William Faulkner

“Pouring out liquor is like burning books.”
― William Faulkner

“It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work. ”
― William Faulkner

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

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

“It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. ”
― William Faulkner

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
― William Faulkner

“War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.”
― William Faulkner