Quotes from William Faulkner

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

and the intolerant eyes which in the last two years had acquired that transparent film which the eyes of carnivorous animals have and from behind which they look at a world which no ruminant ever sees, perhaps dares to see, which I have seen before on the eyes of men who have killed too much, who have killed so much that never again as long as they live will they ever be alone.

There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate has accepted but which digestion cannot compass _occurences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish; are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless; fixed, until we can die.

Man the sum of his climatic experiences

So that's it, he said. Three hundred dollars. I wish somebody would come into this country with a seed that had to be worked everyday from New Year's right on through Christmas. As soon as you niggers are laid-by, trouble starts.

Above the counter where the ranks of crisp shapes behind the glass her neat gray face her hair tight and sparse from her neat gray skull, spectacles in neat gray rims riding approaching like something on a wire, like a cash box in a store. 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

It is jealousy, I think, which makes us wish to prevent young people doing the things we had not the courage or the opportunity ourselves to accomplish once, and have not the power to do now.

not even as three women, but merely as three creatures who still possessed the need to eat but took no pleasure in it, the need to sleep but from no joy in weariness or regeneration

who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?

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?

I says to myself it's a good thing her eyes are giving out

no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realised that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman

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

Beyond the bordering weeds a fence strangled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds beside it the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed there - skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they.

And so if Cash nails the box up, she is not a rabbit.

But then, in the eyes all of them look like they had no age and knew everything in the world, anyhow.

Time? Time? Why worry about something that takes care of itself so well? You were born with the habit of consuming time. Be satisfied with that.

Because almost before he had even had time to think that, his uncle said, striding on, glib, familiar, quick, incorrigibly garrulous, incorrigibly discursive, who had always something curiously truthful yet always a little bizarre to say about almost anything that didn't really concern him:

I could still see the smoke stack. That's where the water would be, healing out to the sea and the peaceful grottoes.

She accepted that--not reconciled: accepted--as though there is a breathing-point in outrage when you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, 'thank God, this is all; at least I now know all of it--

It used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned.

But he was not a coward...not so much to the idea of pouring out human blood and life, but at the idea of waste of wearing out and eating up and shooting away material in any cause whatever.

Porque Padre decía que los relojes asesinan el tiempo. Él dijo que el tiempo está muerto mientras es recontado por el tictac de las ruedecillas; sólo al detenerse el reloj vuelve el tiempo a la vida. Las manecillas estaban extendidas, ligeramente inclinadas haciendo un leve ángulo, como una gaviota suspendida en el viento.

If ever was such a misfortunate man," pa says.