Quotes from William Faulkner

From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave him.

He…who had not waited for Time and its furniture to teach him that the end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Now I know it to be merely a function of the mind - and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town

Our windows were dark. The entrance was empty. I walked close to the left wall when I entered, but it was empty: just the stairs curving up into shadows echoes of feet in the sad generations like light dust upon the shadows, my feet waking them like dust, lightly to settle again. I

Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't. (William Faulkner)

because Harvard is such a fine sound forty acres is no high price for a fine sound. A fine dead sound we will swap Benjy's pasture for a fine dead sound. It will last him a long time because he cannot hear it unless he can smell it

Then she too seemed to blow out of his life on the long wind like a third scrap of paper.

The wagon wound and jolted between the slow and shifting yet constant walls from beyond and above which the wilderness watched them pass, less than inimical now and never to be inimical again since the buck still and forever leaped, the shaking gun-barrels coming constantly and forever steady at last, crashing, and still out of his instant of immortality the buck sprang, forever immortal

Adesso, affacciato alla finestra, sente soltanto gli immensi, interminabili insetti, respira il caldo, immobile, ricco odore maculato della terra, pensando a quanto, da giovane, da ragazzo, amava l'oscurità, a come la notte camminava oppure si sedeva fra gli alberi. Allora il terreno, la corteccia degli alberi, tutto diventava vero, ricco, selvaggio, evocava strani e minacciosi mezzi piaceri, mezzi terrori. Ne aveva paura. Lo spaventava; amava aver paura.

El lenguaje es como la morfina.

And then, life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die.

Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing.

The somebody you was young with and you growed old in her and she growed old in you, seeing the old coming in and it was one somebody you could hear say it don't matter and know it was the truth outen the hard world ad all a man's grief and trials.

Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.

The three quarters began. The first note sounded, measured and tranquil, serenely peremptory, emptying the unhurried silence for the next one and that's it if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up for an instant then blown cleanly out along the cool eternal dark instead of lying there trying not to think of the swing until all cedars came to have that vivid dead smell of perfume that Benjy hated so.

When we saw her again her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene.

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not yet be old enough to desire the fruits of it, which is not innocence but appetite; his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it, which is not ignorance but size.

looking out upon the whatever ogreworld of that quiet village street with the air of children born too late into their parents' lives and doomed to contemplate all human behavior through the complex and needless follies of adults

He was working fast, yet thinking went slow enough. He knew why now. He knew now that thinking went slow and smooth with calculation, as oil is spread slowly upon a surface above a brewing storm.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.

But always beyond seas, and there was no body to be returned clumsily to earth, and so to her he seemed still to be laughing at that word as he had laughed at all other mouthsounds that stood for repose, who had not waited for Time and its furniture to teach him that the end of wisdom is to dream high enough not to lose the dream in the seeking of it. Aunt Sally rocked steadily in her chair.

It's a comfortable thing, music is.

Meet Mrs. Bundren, he says.

To be young. To be young. There is nothing else like it: there is nothing else in the world