William Faulkner Quotes (214 quotes, page 4)

“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

“So let me say it: That nevertheless and notwithstanding old Carothers did own it. Bought it, got it, no matter; kept it, held it, no matter; bequeathed it: else why do you stand here relinquishing and repudiating? Held it, kept it for fifty years until you could repudiate it, while He—this Arbiter, this Architect, this Umpire—condoned—or did He? Looked down and saw—or did He? Or at least did nothing: saw, and could not, or did not see; saw, and would not, or perhaps He would not see—perverse, impotent, or blind: which?”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

The Bear section 4 (p. 247)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

“He recognised its voice. It was the young hound which even a year ago had had no judgment and which, by the lights of the other hounds anyway, still had none. Maybe that’s what courage is, he thought.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

The Bear section 3 (p. 229)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

Light , Courage

“He was only ten. It seemed to him that he could see them, the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it. Because he recognised now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his own saliva, recognised fear as a boy, a youth recognises the existence of love and passion and experience which is his heritage but not yet his patrimony, from entering by chance the presence of perhaps even merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been loved by many men.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

The Bear section 1 (p. 195)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

Chance , Time , Dogs , Boy

“She accepted that—not reconciled: accepted-- as though there is a breathing-point in outrage where you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, Thank God that is all; at least I know it all.”

William Faulkner book Absalom, Absalom!

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

God , Gratitude

“Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?”

William Faulkner

"Beyond" (1933)

Love , Making love

“You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because of it. I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of death, I know that I am. And that is all the immortality of which intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to have lost him.”

William Faulkner

The Judge to Robert G. Ingersoll
"Beyond" (1933)

Love , Death , Making love

“We never thought, sitting in my office on those afternoons, discussing Voltaire and Ingersoll, that we would ever be brought to this, did we?You, the atheist whom the mere sight of a church spire on the sky could enrage; and I who have never been able to divorce myself from reason enough even to accept your pleasant and labor-saving theory of nihilism.”

William Faulkner

Judge to Mothershed, a suicide
"Beyond" (1933)

“Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.”

William Faulkner book Light in August

Source: Light in August (1932), Chapter 2

Motivation , Madness , Women , Men

“Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying lightly in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Lying

“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Family , Reality , Death , Suffering

“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”

William Faulkner book The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Bitch

“It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. 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

Letter to Malcolm Cowley (11 February 1949), quoted in William Faulkner : A Critical Essay (1970) by Martin Jarrett-Kerr, p. 46; also published in Selected Letters of William Faulkner (1978) by Joseph Blotner, p. 286

History , Books , Sense , Life

“No man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment.”

William Faulkner

An answer to a student's question as to why he writes in long sentences during his Writer-in-Residence time at the University of Virginia in 1957-1958. Faulkner in the University, p. 84
Faulkner in the University (1959)

Past , Parting

“Dont you see?”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

he cried. “Dont you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse? Granted that my people brought the curse onto the land: maybe for that reason their descendants alone can—not resist it, not combat it—maybe just endure and outlast it until the curse is lifted. Then your peoples’ turn will come because we have forfeited ours. But not now. Not yet. Dont you see?”

The Bear section 4 (p. 266)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

“I am beginning to see the first sign of my increasing age: I dont like to know that my orders have been disobeyed, even when I knew when I gave them that they would be.”

William Faulkner book Go Down, Moses

The Bear section 2 (p. 212)
Go Down, Moses (1942)

Age

“I told you once how I believe it isn't love that dies, it's the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn't deserve the chance any more to love.”

William Faulkner

Charlotte Rittenmeyer to Harry Wilbourne, in (Ch. 7) "Wild Palms"; p. 218
The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939)

Love , Chance , Making love

“… the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I had never actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the sum of love is what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.”

William Faulkner

Harry Wilbourne to Charlotte Rittenmeyer, in (Ch. 3) "Wild Palms"; p. 48
The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939)

Time , Reading , Cheating , Suffering

“Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?”

William Faulkner book Absalom, Absalom!

"I dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

last lines (Chapter 9)
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Hate

“Happens is never once.”

William Faulkner book Absalom, Absalom!

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

“It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.”

William Faulkner

The Judge
"Beyond" (1933)

Men

“...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 book Light in August

Gail Hightower's thoughts in Chapter 20
Light in August (1932)

Truth

“Poor man. Poor mankind.”

William Faulkner book Light in August

Source: Light in August (1932), Chapter 4

“For the holy are susceptible too to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid… and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy.”

William Faulkner

"Mistral" (1931)

God , Evil , Fools

“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.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Way , Thinking

“Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Despair , Life

“Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Forgetting , People , Love , Fear

“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.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Love , Fear , Making love , Time

“Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.”

William Faulkner book The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Evil , Women , Men

“When people act like niggers, no matter who they are, the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger.”

William Faulkner book The Sound and the Fury

Jason to Caddy
The Sound and the Fury (1929)

People

“Why that’s a hundred miles away. That’s a long way to go just to eat.”

William Faulkner

On declining invitation to White House dinner honoring Nobel laureates, as quoted in Life magazine (20 January 1962)

Way

“Be scared. You can't help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.”

William Faulkner

"The Bear” in The Saturday Evening Post (9 May 1942)

Hurt , Help

“Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I’d take Scotch. It’s the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.”

William Faulkner

Source: As quoted in National Observer (3 February 1964)

“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.”

William Faulkner book The Mansion

Miracle, pure miracle anyhow, how little a man needs to outlast jest [just] about anything.
V. K. Ratliff about Gavin Stevens in Ch. 6
The Mansion (1959)

“You don't know very much about women, do you?”

William Faulkner book The Town

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

Women