Quotes from William Faulkner

who thus translated the Chickasaw title meaning The Man; which translation Ikkemotubbe, himself a man of wit and imagination as well as a shrewd judge of character, including his own, carried it one step further and anglicised it to Doom.

He had been too successful, you see; his was that solitude of contempt and distrust which success brings to him who gained it because he was strong instead of merely lucky.

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

He says it harshly, savagely, but he does not say the word. Like a little boy in the dark to flail his courage and suddenly aghast into silence by his own noise.

Algunos días a finales de Agosto son en casa como éste, el aire fino y anhelante como éste, habiendo en él algo triste y nostálgico y familiar. El hombre la suma de sus experiencias climáticas, dijo Padre. El hombre la suma de lo que te dé la gana. Un problema de propiedades impuras tediosamente arrastrado hacia una inmutable nada: jaquemate de polvo y deseo.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or your predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

The destiny of the land, the nation, the South, the State, the County, was already whirling into the plunge of its precipice, not that the State and the South knew it, because the first seconds of fall always seem like soar.

as though it had known to the second when I was to enter, had waited there during that entire twelve miles behind that walking mule and watched me draw nearer and nearer and enter the door at last as it had know (ay, decreed, since there is that justice whose Moloch's palate-paunch makes no distinction between gristle bone and tender flesh) that I would enter — …

and your grandfather said, 'Suffer little children to come unto Me': and what did He mean by that? how, if He meant that little children should need to be suffered to approach Him, what sort of earth had He created; that if they had to suffer in order to approach Him, what sort of Heaven did He have?)

Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. But he dont like to admit it to them until they have beards.

odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can

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.

The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice.

Lo que hace la literatura es lo mismo que una cerilla en medio de un campo en mitad de la noche. Una cerilla no ilumina apenas nada, pero nos permite ver cuánta oscuridad hay a su alrededor.

Like any good optimist, I don't expect the worst to happen. Only, like any optimist worth his salt, I like to go and look as soon as possible afterward jest in case it did.

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.

Nowadays he drove the car into town to fetch his grandfather from habit alone, and though he still considered forty five miles an hour merely cruising speed, he no longer took cold and fiendish pleasure in turning curves on two wheels or in detaching mules from wagons by striking the whiffle-trees with his bumper in passing.

in the woods the tree frogs were going smelling rain in the air they sounded like toy music boxes that were hard to turn and the honeysuckle come

If somebody tole you, hit could be a lie. But if you dream hit, hit can't be a lie case ain't nobody there to tole hit to you

If you are going to write, write about human nature. That is the only thing that doesn't date.

she looked at me then everything emptied out of her eyes and they looked like the eyes in statues blank and unseeing and serene put

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?

This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen: this Niobe without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all.

All right. What do you want me to do?' 'Go out there and look at him,' Lucas said. 'Go out where and look at who?' he said. But he understood all right. It seemed to him that he had known all the time what it would be; he thought with a kind of relief So that's all it is even while his automatic voice was screeching with outraged disbelief: 'Me? Me?