William Faulkner Quotes

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

Sólo el campo de batalla revela al hombre su propia locura y desesperación y la victoria es ilusión de filósofos e idiotas.

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.

...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. 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.

Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

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

Making or getting money is a kind of game where there are not any rules at all.

Fiction is often the best fact.

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.

"What is it? something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your childrens' children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett's charge at Manassas?" 'Gettysburg,' Quentin said. 'You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

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

You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do you.

Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

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