William Faulkner Quotes - Page 15

Quotes about:

• Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

  William Faulkner

  Understanding, Gettysburg, Born

  William Faulkner (1951). “Absalom, Absalom!”

  5 Copy quote

• We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.

  William Faulkner

  Money, Littles, Might

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• ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

  William Faulkner

  Men, Order, Sound

  William Faulkner (1972). “Light in August”, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.

  William Faulkner

  Passion, World, Purity

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• In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

  William Faulkner

  Artist, Europe, America

  William Faulkner (2006). “Novels, 1926-1929”

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• I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.

  William Faulkner

  Materials, Ifs, I Can

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• A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.

  William Faulkner

  Wind, Bird, Pairs

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.254, Modern Library

  9 Copy quote

• If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time

  William Faulkner

  Nice, Would Be, Ravel

  William Faulkner (2000). “As I lay dying: the corrected text”, Random House Inc

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Country, Men, Land

  William Faulkner (1985). “Novels, 1930-1935”, Library of America

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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• She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

  William Faulkner

  Spite, Incapable

  William Faulkner “The Sound and the Fury”, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.

  William Faulkner

  Book, Ambition, Effort

  William Faulkner, Joseph Leo Blotner (1978). “Selected letters of William Faulkner”, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

• A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.

  William Faulkner

  Life, Thinking, Sorrow

  William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

  4 Copy quote

• And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away

  William Faulkner

  Dog, Echoes, Air

  William Faulkner “The Sound and the Fury”, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.

  William Faulkner

  Air, Long, Sound

  William Faulkner “The Sound and the Fury”, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Sleep, Bridges, Long

  William Faulkner (1946). “The Sound and the Fury: And As I Lay Dying”, New York : The Modern library

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  William Faulkner

  Children, Pride, Motherhood

  William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

  4 Copy quote

• Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Heart, Men

  Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, originally delivered December 10, 1950 in Stockholm Sweden

  4 Copy quote

• It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.

  William Faulkner

  Book, Understanding, Literature

  "Faulkner Without Fanfare". Esquire Magazine, July 1963.

  6 Copy quote

• The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Hot, Quitting

  4 Copy quote

• I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.

  William Faulkner

  Moving, Shadow, Looks

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• Idleness breeds our better virtues.

  William Faulkner

  Virtue, Idleness

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• Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.

  William Faulkner

  Looks, Aghast, Madness

  William Faulkner (1936). “Absalom, Absalom!”, Random House (NY)

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• Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.

  William Faulkner

  Mean, Stories, Crafts

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• We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.

  William Faulkner

  Evil, Done, Littles

  William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.172, Modern Library

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