Quotes from William Faulkner

no man is ever free and probably could not bear it if he were...

how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

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.

Who gathers the withered rose?

Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

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.

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. That was all I wanted, he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.

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.

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.

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.

Did you ever have a sister? did you?

Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?

It was only as he put his hand on the door that he became aware of complete silence beyond it, a silence which he at eighteen knew that it would take more than one person to make.

Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs

Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

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.

No man can write who is not first a humanitarian

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.