William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury (1929)

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It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.

William Faulkner
Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

William Faulkner
Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.

William Faulkner
It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything — it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.

William Faulkner
Dilsey stroked Ben's head, slowly and steadily, smoothing the bang upon his brow. He wailed quietly, unhurriedly. "Hush," Dilsey said. "Hush, now. We be gone in a minute. Hush, now." He wailed quietly and steadily.

William Faulkner
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.

William Faulkner
Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

William Faulkner
When people act like niggers, no matter who they are the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger.

William Faulkner
They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

William Faulkner
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.

William Faulkner
Because no battle is ever won, he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

William Faulkner
I've seed de first en de last.... I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.

William Faulkner
Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

William Faulkner
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
It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.

William Faulkner