Quotes from William Faulkner

She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight.

who two thousand years hence will still be throwing triumphantly off the yoke of Latin culture and intelligence of which they were never in any great permanent danger to begin with.

He began to breathe deep. He could feel himself breathing deep, as if each time his insides were afraid that next breath they would not be able to give far enough and that something terrible would happen, and that all the time he could look down at himself breathing, at his chest, and see no movement at all, like when dynamite first begins, gathers itself for the now Now NOW, the shape of the outside of the stick does not change

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.

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.

We had long thought of them as a tableau; Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a straddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.

that adult trait of being convinced of anything by an assumption of silent superiority

But I didn't need to see him because he was there, he would always be there; maybe what Druscilla meant by his dream was not something which he possessed but something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes.

a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change.

He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself.

My gad, one of them, warrant officer pilot, captain and M. C. in turn said to me once; if you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all?

I prefer to think that no writer has got time to be too concerned with style, that he is simply telling this dramatic instance in the most effective way he knows, that the book, the story, creates its own style.

I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi

sardonic cerebral pity of the intelligent for any human injustice or folly or suffering

Then the dark began to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep.

Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.

I never said anything more. it doesn't do any good. I've found that when a man gets into a rut the best thing you can do is let him stay there.

He was wrong; he knew he was when it was too late for him to stop just as a drunkard reaches a point where it is too late for him to stop, where he promises himself that he will and maybe believes he will or can but it is too late.

I've done what I could; a man that can live as lone as I have and not know when to quit is a fool.

I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like. But

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep you never were.

Dajem ti sat, ne da se prise?aš vremena, ve? da bi ga ponekad mogao na trenutak zaboraviti, da ne izgubiš dah pokušavaju?i da ga osvojiš. Jer bitke se nikad ne dobijaju. ?ak se i ne biju. Bojno polje samo otkriva ?oveku njegovu ludost i o?ajanje, a pobeda je uvek samo iluzija filozofa i glupaka... Moglo bi se pomisliti da ?e se nesre?a jednog dana umoriti, ali onda samo vreme postaje naša nesre?a.

Father said you swallow like you had a fishbone in your throat...

She looked like a librarian. Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done