William Faulkner Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.

William Faulkner
Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while...

William Faulkner
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

William Faulkner
For the holy are susceptible too to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid… and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy.

William Faulkner
Is Robert Ingersoll telling me that for twenty years I have leaned upon a reed no stronger than myself?

William Faulkner
... leaving as next by seniority Stuart that gallant man born apparently already horsed and sabred and already knowing all there was to know about war except the slogging and brutal stupidity of it...

William Faulkner
Let the past abolish the past when — and if — it can substitute something better.

William Faulkner
So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

William Faulkner
You don't love because, you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

William Faulkner
That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

William Faulkner
…between what did happen and what ought to happened, I don't never have trouble picking ought.

William Faulkner
Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.

William Faulkner
Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..

William Faulkner
This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

William Faulkner
The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.

William Faulkner
Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move — which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

William Faulkner
After a man has had his coffee it's tomorrow: it has to be!…And tomorrow it's just a hangover; you ain't still drunk tomorrow.

William Faulkner
The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

William Faulkner
The problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat

William Faulkner
And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.

William Faulkner
Mr. Khrushchev says that Communism, the police state, will bury the free ones. He is a smart gentleman, he knows that this is nonsense since freedom, man's dim concept of and belief in the human spirit is the cause of all his troubles in his own country. But if he means that Communism will bury capitalism, he is correct. That funeral will occur about ten minutes after the police bury gambling. Because simple man, the human race, will bury both of them. That will be when we have expended the last grain, dram, and iota of our natural resources. But man himself will not be in that grave. The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

William Faulkner
Why do you hate the South?
I don't hate it.... I don't hate it.... I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!

William Faulkner
If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

William Faulkner
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.

William Faulkner
It is his [the poet's, the writer's] privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

William Faulkner
Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones.

William Faulkner
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

William Faulkner
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

William Faulkner
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

William Faulkner
You said how on that instant when Ikkemotubbe realised that he could sell the land to Grandfather, it ceased forever to have been his.

William Faulkner