William Faulkner Quotes

“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, Go Down, Moses

“Caddy put her arms around me, and her shining veil, and I couldn't smell trees anymore and I began to cry.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it.”
― Truman Capote, Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote

“The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.”
― William Faulkner

“battles lost not alone because of superior numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in contemporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say 'Go there' conferred upon them by an absolute caste system”
― William Faulkner

“[B]ecause the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.”
― William Faulkner

“I knew Faulkner very well. He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet. Then you could be a great friend!”
― Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote

“Writing is a solitary job--that is, no one can help you with it, bu there's nothing lonely about it. I have always been too busy, too immersed in what I was doing, either mad at it or laughing at it to have time to wonder whether I was lonely or not lonely. It's simply solitary. I think there is a difference between loneliness and solitude.”
― William Faulkner at the University of Virginia

“The past was never dead; it was never past. But it didn’t have to own you, either. It didn’t have to be all you were.”
― Kimi Cunningham Grant, Fallen Mountains

“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 of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists sat 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.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Because you know that's all I needs, all I wants, is for you to try to run, to turn your back on me and run. I know you aint going to. Because all you got to beat is me. I got to beat old Carothers. Get your pistol."
"No," the other said. "Go home. Get out of here. Tonight I will come to your house-----"
"After this?" Lucas said. "Me and you, in the same country, breathing the same air even? No matter what you could say, what you could even prove so I would have to believe it, after this? Get your pistol.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“When they get done sending you to Parchman you'll have plenty of time between working cotton and corn you aint going to get no third and fourth of even, to study it." They looked at one another.
"Yes sir," George said. 'Especially wid you there to help me worry hit out.”
― William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

“Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying to write down the heart's truth out of the heart's driving complexity, for all the complex and troubled hearts which would beat after them.”
― William Faulkner "The Bear"

“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

“Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“He aimed for them to stay put like a tree or a stand of corn. Because if He'd a aimed for man to be always a-moving and going somewhere else, wouldn't He put him longways on his belly, like a snake? It stands to reason He would.”
― William Faulkner

“What is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted. Furtive, implacable and tricky, it inspirits both the observer and the scene observed, artifacts, manners and atmosphere and it speaks even when no one wills to listen.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“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.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“That's what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“ისინი ითმენენ, ითმენენ, კვლავ ითმენენ - ხვალ, კიდევ ხვალ, კიდევ ხვალ, ითმენენ, სულ ითმენენ... ხვალ აღარ დადგება - თქვა ბიჭმა და გზას გაუდგა”
― William Faulkner

“ერთხელ შერვუდ ანდერსონმა ასეთი რამ მითხრა — რომ დაიწყო, მთავარია, არსებობდეს ის საწყისი, საიდანაც შეძლებ დაწყებას. შენ ერთი სოფლელი ბიჭი ხარ. რაც შენ იცი, არის მიწის პატარა ნაგლეჯი მისისიპიზე, ადგილი, საიდანაც
წარმოშობით ხარ, მაგრამ ესეც საკმარისია. ესეც ხომ ამერიკაა, თავისი ძალიან პატარა, უცნობი კუთხით. აბა, გამოაცალე იგი, როგორც აგური კედელს, _ და კედელიც
ჩამოინგრევა”
― William Faulkner

“ვისთანაც შენ ახალგაზრდობა გაატარე და ვისაც შეაბერდი, ვინც შენთან ერთად იმასაც მოესწრო, თუ როგორ ახლოვდებოდა სიბერე, სწორედ ის ამბობს, ყველაფერი სისულელეაო და შენც ხვდები რომ ეს სიმართლეა, რომ ქვეყანა,მთელი თავისი მწუხარებითა და ტანჯვით, შეუბრალებელია და დამცინავი”
― William Faulkner

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past. When I discovered that quotation not long ago on BrainyQuote.com, I was thunderstruck. I thought, Who the fook is Faulkner?”
― Prince Harry, Spare