William Faulkner: Quotes about time

“The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.”

“Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was”

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.”

“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune”

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”

“I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.”

“The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.”

“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

“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.”

“I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.”

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

“Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.”

“Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

“And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.”

“Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.”

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

“That’s what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events.”

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

“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.”