William Faulkner: Evening

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

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”

“She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.”

“You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.”

“And sure enough, even waiting will end… if you can just wait long enough.”

“The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.”

“And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.”

“Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

“I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.”

“And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”

“I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie”

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

“We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.”

“… surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..”

“The poets are wrong of course. … But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.”

“…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.”

“…even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts, but … even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing.… So now, as another poet sings, That Fancy passed me by And nothing will remain; which, praise the gods, is a damned lie since, praise, O gods! Nothing cannot remain anywhere since nothing is vacuum and vacuum is paradox and unbearable and we will have nothing of it even if we would, the damned-fool poet's Nothing.”

“"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."”

“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.”