Top 100 William Faulkner Quotes
#1. Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner
#3. There is no such thing as a bad whisky. Some whiskies just happen to be better than others.
William Faulkner
#5. When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
William Faulkner
#6. I reckon I'll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won't ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who's got two cents to buy a stamp.
William Faulkner
#8. [] no man is ever free and probably could not bear it if he were ...
William Faulkner
#9. He was as calm as a god who has seen both life and death, and seen nothing of particular importance in either of them.
William Faulkner
#10. 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.
William Faulkner
#11. 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
#13. You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.
William Faulkner
#14. Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
William Faulkner
#15. Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.
William Faulkner
#16. How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
William Faulkner
#17. It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.
William Faulkner
#18. Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
William Faulkner
#19. And so sometimes I would think how the devil had conquered God.
William Faulkner
#20. It was that his words, his telling, just did not synchronize with what his hearers believed would (and must) be the scope of a single individual.
William Faulkner
#21. I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi
William Faulkner
#22. You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
William Faulkner
#23. Only fools imply compliments. The wise man comes right out with it, point-blank. Imply criticism
unless the criticized isn't within earshot.
William Faulkner
#25. It was her wedding dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had laid her head to foot in it so the dress could spread out, and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn't show.
William Faulkner
#26. You know that 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.
William Faulkner
#27. There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty; then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.
William Faulkner
#28. He is looking down at her peaceful, rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf.
William Faulkner
#29. When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.
William Faulkner
#31. 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
#32. Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
William Faulkner
#33. But who knows why a man, though suffering, clings, above all the other well members, to the arm or leg which he knows must come off?
William Faulkner
#34. the three of us in that state where the very bones and muscles are too tired to rest, when the attenuated and invincible spirit has changed and shaped even hopelessness into the easy obliviousness of a worn garment
William Faulkner
#35. Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood - well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.
William Faulkner
#36. And when Hightower approaches, the smell of plump unwashed flesh and unfresh clothing
that odor of unfastidious sedentation, of static overflesh not often enough bathed
is well nigh overpowering. [ ... ] It is the odor of goodness. Of course it would smell bad to us that are bad and sinful.
William Faulkner
#38. Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
#39. In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.
William Faulkner
#40. So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice ...
William Faulkner
#42. The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.
William Faulkner
#43. 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
#44. Writing is one-third imagination, one-third experience, and one third observation.
William Faulkner
#45. The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.
William Faulkner
#46. She carried her head high enough - even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness
William Faulkner
#47. 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
#48. It's Cash and Jewel and Varadaman and Dewey Del', pa says kind of hangdog and proud too, with this teeth and all, even if he wouldn't look at us. 'Meet Mrs Bundren', he says.
William Faulkner
#50. 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
#51. I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness
people and things that are compatible, love ... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
William Faulkner
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. It's not four days ago I find a bastard squatting here, asking me if I read books. Like he would jump me with a book or something. Take me for a ride with the telephone directory.
William Faulkner
#56. If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame ... Only you and me amid the pointing and the horror walled by the clean flame.
William Faulkner
#57. 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
#58. 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.
William Faulkner
#59. Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done
William Faulkner
#60. A dream is not a very safe thing to be near ... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.
William Faulkner
#61. Be scared.You can't help that. But don't be afraid, Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you if you don't corner it or it don't smell that you are afraid. A bear or a deer has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.
William Faulkner
#63. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.
William Faulkner
#64. 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
#65. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
William Faulkner
#66. Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.
William Faulkner
#67. It takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you are losing,
William Faulkner
#68. For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it won't stand a whole lot of racking. It's best when it all runs along the same, doing the day's work and not no one part used no more than needful.
William Faulkner
#69. Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if we were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.
William Faulkner
#70. It's like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it for anything else very important.
William Faulkner
#72. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.
William Faulkner
#73. No man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.
William Faulkner
#74. He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.
William Faulkner
#75. Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.
William Faulkner
#76. 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
#78. You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
William Faulkner
#79. Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.
William Faulkner
#80. Hears her and turns and sees her face fade like the dying agitation of a dropped pebble in a spring.
William Faulkner
#81. Only a fool trys to outsmart smart people, and anyone that trys to fool fools is himself already one.
~William Faulkner~
William Faulkner
#83. Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago
William Faulkner
#84. You like orchids? ... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
William Faulkner
#85. Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.
William Faulkner
#87. Forget grief. Only an idiot has no grief, and only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?
William Faulkner
#89. I was a little crazy. You know how it is, how you want to rush into something you know is going to happen, no matter what it is. I guess lovers and suicides both know that feeling.
William Faulkner
#90. Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity; it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
William Faulkner
#92. You're not being tried by common sense," Horace said. "You're being tried by a jury.
William Faulkner
#94. Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.
William Faulkner
#95. It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.
William Faulkner
#96. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863.
William Faulkner
#97. I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.
William Faulkner
#98. You will find that even injustice is scarcely worthy of what you believe yourself to be.
William Faulkner
#100. He was working fast, yet thinking went slow enough. He knew why now. He knew now that thinking went slow and smooth with calculation, as oil is spread slowly upon a surface above a brewing storm.
William Faulkner
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
