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William Faulkner

William Faulkner Quotes

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Famous William Faulkner Quotes

“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”

WritingTryingLongDoeI CanEnoughCharacterMovingCan DoBehindsFeetPaperPencilsFiction WritingWriters And WritingFiction WritersWriting FictionWriting By WritersCreativity And WritingPaper And Pencil
Book:Faulkner at West Point
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“It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.”

RunningLinesSpaceQualityDistanceStringsThreadParallelsIntervalsSpace BetweenIrrevocable
Book:William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck
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“That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.”

TryingChildrenCareBornPrideFitMotherhood
Book:The Best of Faulkner
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“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.”

WayLongMatterWaterSleepGoneLong TimeShadowLaysBottomBonesBridgesDelicateLeafsLong WayTissues
Book:The Sound and the Fury: And As I Lay Dying
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“It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.”

MenYearsMadeWholeRunningNamesMillionsCollegeTenHusbandRaisesPairsProfessorsSockCollege Professors
Book:The Sound and the Fury (Third International Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
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“I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.”

IfsMenLooksKindDoeMadeStillsHardWould BeMovingHateWaterListeningProudRiversStartingCome UpSettingSettingsBridgesLazyStayingBe KindStoppingWagonsLazy Man
Book:The Sound and the Fury: And As I Lay Dying
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“They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph”

PeopleIfsLittlesTwoEnoughDiesNamesSunOceanWorthySmellBeachGood EnoughFoulEpitaph
Author:William Faulkner
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“. . .in August in Mississippi there’s a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a soft, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times. It might have fauns and satyrs and the gods and---from Greece, from Olympus in it somewhere. It lasts just for a day or two, then it’s gone. . .the title reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization.”

TwoLightMightTodayChristianLastsFallQualityGoneMiddleMonthsCivilizationTitlesClassicGreeceAugustMississippiLuminousOlympusSatyrsFauns
Author:William Faulkner
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“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.”

ThinkingYearsWholeFeelingsSeemsWantedAsksWaterNaturalKnownAirLonelinessBecomingQuietDespairSpringBirdLonelyBreathsFilledBreathePeacefulDawnThirtyGrayWakingFuryThirty YearsDaylightAmazementSuspensionBecoming OneSpring Water
Author:William Faulkner
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