William Faulkner Quotes About Past

Quotes about: Past

• The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

  William Faulkner

  Drama, Taken, Past

• Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.

  William Faulkner

  Sweet, Memories, Past

• The past is never dead. It's not even past.

  William Faulkner

  Wisdom, Past, Heredity And Environment

  Requiem for a Nun act 1 (1951)

• You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.

  William Faulkner

  Real, Past, History

• We will have to choose not between color nor race nor religion nor between East and West either, but simply between being slaves and being free. And we will have to choose completely and for good; the time is already past now when we can choose a little of each, a little of both. We can choose a state of slavedom, and if we are powerful enough to be among the top two or three or ten, we can have a certain amount of license - until someone more powerful rises and has us machine-gunned against a cellar wall.

  William Faulkner

  Wisdom, Wall, Powerful

  William Faulkner (2011). “Essays, Speeches & Public Letters”, p.150, Modern Library

• Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.

  William Faulkner

  Past, Substitutes, Something Better

  William Faulkner (2011). “Essays, Speeches & Public Letters”, p.169, Modern Library

• A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

  William Faulkner

  Past, Simple, Men

• The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

  William Faulkner

  Hope, Writing, Heart

  Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, 10 Dec. 1950

• The past isn't over. It isn't even past.

  William Faulkner

  Past, Over It

  "Requiem for a Nun". Book by William Faulkner, 1951.

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