William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

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We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.

William Faulkner
Tell about the South. What's it's like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

William Faulkner
I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized

William Faulkner
Gettysburg.... You can't understand it. You would have to be born there.

William Faulkner
... but one mistake; that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgement and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realising that actually you cannot, that actually it is the stronger (41).

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
I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.

William Faulkner
Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.

William Faulkner
It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.

William Faulkner
There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.

William Faulkner
Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.

William Faulkner
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

William Faulkner
Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.

William Faulkner
Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

William Faulkner
To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.

William Faulkner