Quotes from William Faulkner

Te lo doy, no para que recuerdes el tiempo, sino para que consigas olvidarlo de vez en cuando durante un momento y no malgastes todo tu aliento intentando conquistarlo. Porque ninguna batalla se ganas jamás, como él decía Ni tan siquiera se libra. Sólo el campo de batalla revela al hombre su propia locura y desesperación, y la victoria es ilusión de filósofos e idiotas.

The past is never dead. It's not even past; it's always part of the present.

Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe. (on Mark Twain)

even though they had surrendered and said that they were whipped, were still soldiers. Maybe from the old habit of doing everything as one man; maybe when you have lived for four years in a world ordered completely by men's doings, even when it is danger and fighting, you dont want to quit that world: maybe the danger and the fighting are the reasons, because men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

It's like some folks has the smooth, pretty boards to build a courthouse with and others dont have no more than rough lumber fitten to build a chicken coop. But it's better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse, and when they both build shoddy or build well, neither because it's one or tother is going to make a man feel the better nor the worse.

But again I dont know. Maybe it didn't take even three years of freedom, immunity from it to learn that perhaps the entire dilemma of man's condition is because of the ceaseless gabble with which he has surrounded himself, enclosed himself, insulated himself from the penalties of his own folly, which otherwise—the penalties, the simple red ink—might have enabled him by now to have made his condition solvent, workable, successful.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, being an artist is an excuse for a form of behavior.

and Judith, the young girl dreaming, not living, in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness.

The bells were ringing again, high in the scudding sunlight in bright disorderly tatters of sound.

Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death.

Recordaba que mi padre solía decir que la razón de vivir era prepararse para estar muerto durante mucho tiempo.

It's like a man that's let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.

A]nd I realized then the unmitigable chasm between all life and all print–that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can't, write about it.

Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock.

We go on, with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.

There are good men everywhere, at all times. Most men are. Some are just unlucky, because most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I've known some that even the circumstances couldn't stop. ~from 'Delta Autumn

While I waited for him in the woods, waiting for him before he saw me, I would think of him as dressed in sin. I would think of him as thinking of me as dressed also in sin, he the more beautiful since the garment which he had exchanged for sin was sanctified. I would think of the sin as garments which we would remove in order to shape and coerce the terrible blood to the forlorn echo of the dead word high in the air.

The very fact that he could and did see no paradox in the fact that he took an active part in a partisan war and on the very side whose principles opposed to his own, was proof enough that he was two separate and complete people, one of whom dwelled by serene rules in a world where reality did not exist.

I was a little crazy. You know how it is, how you want to rush into something you know is going to happen, no matter what it is. I guess lovers and suicides both know that feeling.

Byron listened quietly, thinking to himself how people everywhere are about the same, but that it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.

Nothing can marry two people closer than a mutual sin in the world's eyes.

It's like some folks has the smooth, pretty boards to build a courthouse with and others dont have no more than rough lumber fitten to build a chicken coop. But's it's better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse...