Quotes from William Faulkner

In the army, you dont ask what you are going to do: you just do it. In fact, the way to get along in any army is never even to wonder why they want something done or what they are going to do with it after it's finished, but just do it and then get out of sight so that they cant just happen to see you by accident and then think up something for you to do, but instead they will have to have thought up something to be done, and then hunt for somebody to do it.

Then that had passed. It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books;

Después todos hablaron de lo que harían con veinticinco dólares. Todos hablaban a la vez, insistentes y contradictorias sus voces, convirtiendo lo irreal en posible, luego en probable, después en hecho incontrovertible, como hace la gente al trasnformar sus deseos en palabras.

I write when I am inspired and I make sure I am inspired every day.

When folks wants a fellow, it's best to wait till they sends for him, I've found.

I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent of that folly you will never learn.

resembling in his spectacles and nothing else (from the waist down the table concealed him; anyone entering the room would have taken him to be stark naked) a baroque effigy created out of colored cake dough by someone with a faintly nightmarish affinity for the perverse

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. --Wm. Faulkner

If all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country town

I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

It was not for an outrage that they grieved, but for simple grief: the only alternative to which was nothing, and between grief and nothing only the coward takes nothing.

Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Shirts. I thought all the time they were khaki, army issue khaki, until I saw they were of heavy Chinese silk or finest flannel because they made his face so brown his eyes so blue. Dalton Ames. It just missed gentility. Theatrical fixture. Just papier-mache, then touch. Oh. Asbestos. Not quite bronze.

She said nothing. She walked beside me, under my elbow sort of, eating. We went on. It was quiet, hardly anyone about getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed She would have told me not to let me sit there on the steps hearing her door twilight slamming hearing Benjy still crying Supper she would have to come down then getting honeysuckle all mixed up in it   We reached the corner.

curiosity is another of the mistresses whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

Yes, urge I do: warped chrysalis of what blind perfect seed: for who shall say what gnarled forgotten root might not bloom yet with some globed concentrate more globed and concentrate and heady-perfect because the neglected root was planted warped and lay not dead but merely slept forgot?

Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that–but ask the tear ducts if they have forgotten how to weep.

here it is it was right here all the time was it come on I got up and followed we went up the hill the crickets hushing before us its funny how you can sit down and drop something and have to hunt all around for it the gray it was gray with dew slanting up into the gray sky then the trees beyond damn that honeysuckle I wish it would stop you used to like it we

Ze sÅ'uchawkÄ… w rÄ™ce patrzyÅ' na drzwi, przez które wpadaÅ' ten bÅ'Ä™dny i dra?niÄ…cy powiew. ZaczÄ…Å' cytowa? coÅ› z jakiejÅ› dawno czytanej ksi??ki: "Spokoju coraz mniej! Spokoju coraz mniej!

There was something about his wolflike independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral which impressed strangers, as if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his.

But Uncle Gavin says it don't take many words to tell the sum of any human experience; that somebody has already done it in eight: He was born, he suffered and he died.

This world is not his world; this life his life.

Only a fool tries to outsmart smart people, and anyone that tries to fool fools is already one. ~

Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it. Because

Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable----And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.