William Faulkner Quotes

Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

He turned the pages in steady progression, though now and then he would seem to linger upon one page, one line, perhaps one word. He would not look up then. He would not move, apparently arrested and held immobile by a single word which had perhaps not yet impacted, his whole being suspended by the single trivial combination of letters in quiet and sunny space, so that hanging motionless and without physical weight he seemed to watch the slow flowing of time beneath him, thinking All I wanted was peace thinking,

"She’s a-going," he says. "Her mind is set on it." It’s a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy or more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night-gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. "You all will have to look out for pa the best you can," she said. "I’m tired."

She has no mother because fatherblood hates with love and pride, but motherblood with hate loves and cohabits.

And that wasn't the first time it ever occurred to me that this world ain't run like it ought to be run a heap of more times than what it is.

God is foolish at times, but at least He’s a gentleman. Dont you know that?” “I always thought of Him as a man,” the woman said.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

...and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

It's like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it for anything else very important.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

Then it wasn't and she was, and now it is and she wasn't.

...Stevens himself hating horses even more than dogs, rating the horse an unassailable first in loathing since though both were parasites, the dog at least had the grace to be a sycophant too; it at least fawned on you and so kept you healthily ashamed of the human race. But the real reason was, though neither the horse nor the dog ever forgot anything, the dog at least forgave you; and his, Stevens's, thought was that what the world needed was more forgiving.

Poor man. Poor mankind.

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.