William Faulkner: Trending quotes (page 9)

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“My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.”

William Faulkner

Paris Review interview (1958)

Food

“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do — after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”

William Faulkner

Paris Review interview (1958)

People , World , Strong , Learning

“"You don't know very much about women, do you?" she said. "Women aren't interested in poets' dreams. They are interested in facts. It doesn't even matter whether the facts are true or not, as long as they match the other facts without leaving a rough seam."”

William Faulkner book The Town

Eula Varner Snopes to Gavin Stevens in Ch. 15
The Town (1957)

Women , Dreams

“Maybe I was completely wrong that morning when I said how women are only interested in facts because maybe men are just interested in facts too and the only difference is, women dont care whether they are facts or not just so they fit, and men dont care whether they fit or not just so they are facts.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Eula Varner Snopes to Gavin Stevens in Ch. 20
The Town (1957)

Women , Men

“At least wasn't nobody, no outsider, there to hear it so maybe even before next January he was able to believe hadn't none of it even been said, like miracle: what aint believed aint seen. Miracle, pure miracle anyhow, how little a man needs to outlast jest [just] about anything.”

William Faulkner book The Mansion

V. K. Ratliff about Gavin Stevens in Ch. 6
The Mansion (1959)

“Because women are marvellous. They stroll perfectly bland and serene through a fact that the men have been bloodying their heads against for years; whereupon you find that the fact not only wasn't important, it wasn't really there.”

William Faulkner book The Mansion

Charles Mallinson in Ch. 9
The Mansion (1959)

Women , Men

“… maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly all the time, is having to accept it.”

William Faulkner book Requiem for a Nun

Act 2, sc. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=EBMFAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Maybe+the+only+thing+worse+than+having+to+give+gratitude+constantly%22+%22is+having+to+accept+it%22&pg=PA155#v=onepage
Requiem for a Nun (1951)

Time , Gratitude

“…girls, women, are not interested in romance but only facts.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Gavin Stevens to Eula Varner Snopes in Ch. 20
The Town (1957)

Women , Girl

“… so vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.”

William Faulkner book Requiem for a Nun

Last paragraph, Act 3, The Jail (Nor even yet quite relinquish —)
Requiem for a Nun (1951)

Truth , Dreams , Imagination

“Because as a rule women dont really care about facts just so they fit; it's just men that dont give a damn whether they fit or not.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Gavin Stevens to V. K. Ratliff in Ch. 24
The Town (1957)

Women , Men

“I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”

William Faulkner

Paris Review interview (1958)

“…life is not so much motion as an inventless repetition of motion.”

William Faulkner book The Mansion

Charles Mallinson in Ch. 8
The Mansion (1959)

Life

“If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.”

William Faulkner

Paris Review interview (1958)

Hate , Envy

“She wanted to tell me. Maybe she even tried. But she couldn't. It wasn't because I was only twelve. It was because I was her child, created by her and Father because they wanted to be in bed together and nothing else would do, nobody else would do. You see? … Because to the child, he was not created by his mother's and his father's passion or capacity for it. He couldn't have been because he was there first, he came first, before the passion; he created the passion, not only it but the man and the woman who served it; his father is not his father but his son-in-law, his mother not his mother but his daughter-in-law if he is a girl. … and if a boy or a girl really is his father's and her mother's father-in-law or mother-in-law, which would make the girl her brother's mother no matter how much younger she was, then a girl with just one brother and him a twin at that, would maybe be his wife and mother too.”

William Faulkner book The Town

Charles Mallinson in Ch. 19; Charles Mallinson's mother, Maggie, and his uncle, Gavin Stevens, besides being their parents' only children, are twins.
The Town (1957)

Law , Girl , Boy , Passion

“Then me too in Paris for the last two weeks, to see if the Paris of Hemingway and the Paris of Scott Fitzgerald (they were not the same ones; they merely used the same room) had vanished completely or not too.”

William Faulkner book The Mansion

Charles Mallinson in Ch. 9. The date is summer 1938.
The Mansion (1959)

“Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move — which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.”

William Faulkner

Paris Review interview (1958)

Life , God , Pleasure , Dreams

“He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

William Faulkner

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1950)

Forgetting , Victory , Hope , Heart

“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....”

William Faulkner

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1950)

Question , Heart , Universe , Problem

“It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.”

William Faulkner book Intruder in the Dust

The opening sentence of the novel, Ch. 1
Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Night

“This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares…. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

Delta Autumn (p. 347)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

Time , Night , Wealth , People