William Faulkner - Light in August (1932)

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The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene...

William Faulkner
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

William Faulkner
That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.

William Faulkner
It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.

William Faulkner
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.

William Faulkner
Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?

William Faulkner
Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

William Faulkner
He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.

William Faulkner
Thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

William Faulkner
Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.

William Faulkner
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

William Faulkner
A fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change.

William Faulkner
Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.

William Faulkner
Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.

William Faulkner
Too much happens.... Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.... That's what's so terrible.

William Faulkner
A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.

William Faulkner
'... ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.'

William Faulkner
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

William Faulkner
Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.

William Faulkner
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.

William Faulkner