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Quotes from William Faulkner

CiteÅŸte, citeÅŸte, citeÅŸte. CiteÅŸte totul – gunoi, clasicii, r?ii ÅŸi bunii, ÅŸi vezi cum scriu. La fel ca un tâmplar care lucreaz? ca ucenic ÅŸi îÅŸi studiaz? maestrul. CiteÅŸte! Vei absorbi asta. Apoi scrie. Dac? ai scris ceva bun, vei afla. Dac? nu, arunc? ce-ai scris pe fereastr?.
~ William Faulkner
Mrs Armstid does not rattle the stove now, though her back is still toward the younger woman. Then she turns. They look at one another, suddenly naked, watching one another; the young woman in the chair, with her neat hair and her inert hands upon her lap, and the older one beside the stove, turning motionless too, with a savage screw of gray hair at the base of her skull, and a face that might have been carved in sandstone. Then the younger one speaks.
~ William Faulkner
the father who is the natural enemy of any son and son-in-law of whom the mother is the ally, just as after the wedding the father will be the ally of the actual son-in-law who has for mortal foe the mother of his wife.
~ William Faulkner
final itch-footed destination, and at the same time scattering his ebullient seed in a hundred dusky bellies through a thousand miles of wilderness; innocent and gullible, without bowels for avarice or compassion or forethought either, changing the face of the earth: felling a tree which took two hundred years to grow, in order to extract from it a bear or a capful of wild honey;
~ William Faulkner
It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.
~ William Faulkner
He was known through all that country. He had no kin, no ties, and he antedated everyone; nobody knew how old he was—a tall thin man in a filthy frock coat and no shirt beneath it and a long, perfectly white beard reaching below his waist, who lived in a mud-daubed hut in the river bottom five or six miles from any road. He made and sold nostrums and charms, and it was said of him that ate not only frogs and snakes but bugs as well—anything that he could catch.
~ William Faulkner
Je me rappelais que mon père avait coutume de dire que le but de la vie c'est de se préparer à rester mort très longtemps.
~ William Faulkner
And I did not think that Darl would, that sits at the supper table with his eyes gone further than the food and the lamp, full of the land dug out of his skull and the holes filled with distance beyond the land.
~ William Faulkner
Seems like it aint no end to bad luck when once it starts.
~ William Faulkner
He sho a preacher, mon! He didn't look like much at first, but hush!
~ William Faulkner
O dia corria célere sobre suas cabeças, e as janelas esquálidas brilhavam e escurecia numa retrocessão espectral. Passou um carro, pela pista de areia lá fora, rosnando de esforço, e o som foi morrendo. Dilsey estava empertigada em seu banco, a mão pousada no joelho de Ben. Duas lágrimas desciam-lhe as faces murchas, entrando e saindo dasmil coruscações da imolação e da abnegação do tempo.
~ William Faulkner
You cannot swim for new horizons unless you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
~ William Faulkner
It is not realities, circumstances, that astonish us; it is the concussion of what we should have known, if we had only not been so busy believing what we discover later we had taken for the truth for no other reason than that we happened to be believing it at the moment.
~ William Faulkner
the idea (not mine: your great-grandfather's) being that even at eleven a man should already have behind him one year of paying for, assuming responsibility for, the space he occupied, the room he took up, in the world's (Jefferson, Mississippi's, anyway) economy.
~ William Faulkner
We will establish a new land where man can assume that every individual man—not the mass of men but individual men—has inalienable right to individual dignity and freedom within a fabric of individual courage and honorable work and mutual responsibility.
~ William Faulkner
I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone. And I knew that if it had finally occurred to Anse himself that he needed one, it was already too late.
~ William Faulkner
Just like folks. Put off as long as she could having to be brave, knowing all the time that sooner or later she would have to be brave once so she could keep on calling herself a dog, and knowing beforehand what was going to happen when she done it.
~ William Faulkner
Sometimes I ain't so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain't. Sometimes I think it ain't none of us pure crazy and ain't none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
~ William Faulkner
Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquify and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without life like an empty door frame
~ William Faulkner
Koridorun sonuna dönüyorum, f?s?lt? taburlar? gibi sessizlikte kaybolan ayaklar? uyand?ra uyand?ra benzine doÄŸru, saat karanl?k masan?n üstünde öfkeli yalan?n? söylemekte. Sonra perdeler karanl?ktan yüzüme doÄŸru üflüyorlar, soluklar?n? yüzüme b?rak?yorlar. Çeyrek var daha.
~ William Faulkner
I reckon she's right. I reckon if there's ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man's good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.
~ William Faulkner
Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they ain't whupped us yit, air they?
~ William Faulkner
Needings," she said. "It ain't Bory's needings and it ain't Her needings. It's dead folks' needings. Old Marse ]ohn's and Cunnel's and Mister]ohn's and Bayard's that's dead and can't do nothing about it. That's where the needings is. That's what I'm talking about.
~ William Faulkner
People will pay any price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles. Look at Boon. We dont know why.
~ William Faulkner