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William Faulkner citations
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William Faulkner est un romancier et nouvelliste américain, né William Cuthbert Falkner le 25 septembre 1897 à New Albany, dans l'État du Mississippi, et mort le 6 juillet 1962 à Byhalia dans le même État. Publié à partir des années 1920, il reçoit le prix Nobel de littérature en 1949, alors qu'il est encore relativement peu connu.

Il est essentiellement connu pour ses romans et ses nouvelles, mais il a aussi publié des poèmes, des ouvrages de littérature d'enfance et de jeunesse et a travaillé occasionnellement comme scénariste pour le cinéma.

Faulkner, qui a situé la plupart de ses récits dans son état natal du Mississippi, est l'un des écrivains du Sud les plus marquants, aux côtés de Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams et Carson McCullers. Au-delà de cette appartenance à la culture sudiste, il est considéré comme un des plus grands écrivains américains de tous les temps et un écrivain majeur du XXe siècle, qui a exercé une grande influence sur les générations suivantes grâce à son apport novateur.

Ses romans les plus connus sont Le Bruit et la Fureur , Tandis que j'agonise , Sanctuaire , Lumière d'août et Absalon, Absalon ! , souvent considéré comme l'un des plus grands chefs-d'œuvre de la littérature universelle. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. septembre 1897 – 6. juillet 1962
William Faulkner photo
William Faulkner: 232   citations 1   J'aime

William Faulkner citations célèbres

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“Si j'avais le choix entre l'expérience de la douleur et rien, je choisirais la douleur.”

William Faulkner

“Je me rappelais que mon père avait coutume de dire que le but de la vie c'est de se préparer à rester mort très longtemps.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, William Faulkner, Gallimard, 1966, 183, 1930, Du monde entier, Maurice-Edgar Coindreau
Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

“La grange était encore rouge, mais ce n'était plus une grange, maintenant. Elle était écroulée et le rouge montait en tourbillons. La grange s'en est allée, en tourbillons de petites choses rouges, vers le ciel et les étoiles. Et les étoiles ont reculé.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

“L’homme qui proclame que ses aïeux ne l’intéressent pas est seulement un peu moins vain que celui qui fonde toutes ses actions sur la supériorité de sa race.”

William Faulkner livre Sartoris

Sartoris, 1929

“Le soir, après la sortie de l'école, quand le dernier était parti avec son petit nez morveux, au lieu de rentrer à la maison, je descendais la colline jusqu'à la source où je pouvais trouver le calme et les haïr.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

“Des fois, je ne sais pas trop si on a le droit de dire qu'un homme est fou ou non. Des fois, je crois qu'il n'y a personne de complètement fou et personne de complètement sain tant que la majorité n'a pas décidé dans un sens ou dans l'autre. C'est pas tant la façon dont un homme agit que la façon dont la majorité le juge quand il agit ainsi.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

William Faulkner Citations

“Lui aussi avait un mot. Il appelait ça l'amour. Mais il y avait longtemps que j'étais habituée aux mots. Je savais que ce mot était comme les autres, rien qu'une forme pour combler un vide.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

amour , formation

“Les arbres ressemblent aux poulets quand ils ébouriffent leurs plumes dans la poussière fraîche, les jours de grande chaleur. Si je saute de la véranda, je tomberai là où le poisson se trouvait, le poisson tout coupé maintenant en morceaux de non-poisson.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

poisson , arbre

“Notre frère Darl est enfermé dans un cabanon à Jackson. Et là, ses mains sales légèrement posées dans les paisibles intervalles des barreaux, il regarde au dehors, l'écume aux lèvres.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

“Et puis, on n'est pas au monde pour avoir une vie facile. Il n'y aurait pas de raison pour être bon et mourir.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

vie , monde

“Et, pendant ce temps-là, John Sartoris dormait parmi les chérubins guerriers au sein de l’inutile et vaine gloire d’on ne savait quel Dieu qu’il n’avait pas dédaigné de reconnaître.”

William Faulkner livre Sartoris

Sartoris, 1929

temps , Dieu

“Ma mère n'est pas dans la boîte. Ma mère ne sent pas comme ça. Ma mère est un poisson.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

mère , poisson , Boîte

“Si on pouvait tout simplement se défaire dans le temps. Ce serait agréable. Ce serait agréable si on pouvait tout simplement se défaire dans le temps.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

temps , agréable

“Je sais maintenant que ce qui fait d'un homme un imbécile, c'est son inaptitude à suivre même les bons conseils qu'il se donne à lui-même.”

William Faulkner

fr

hommes

“Le passé ne meurt jamais. Il n'est même pas passé.”

William Faulkner

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
en
Dans Requiem pour une nonne.

“Comme nos vies se défont dans le vide et le silence! Gestes las qu'avec lassitude on répète, échos de vieilles contraintes tirés par des bras sans mains d'instruments sans cordes. Au coucher du soleil, nous prenons des attitudes furieuses, avec des gestes morts de poupées.”

William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

Tandis que j'agonise, 1930

silence , soleil , vie , mort

“Dans trois cents ans, ils seront à notre niveau, et la guerre des races sera terminée, pas avant.”

William Faulkner

fr

guerre

William Faulkner: Citations en anglais

“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?”

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William Faulkner livre 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.”

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William Faulkner livre Go Down, Moses

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

“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.”

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William Faulkner livre Go Down, Moses

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

“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.”

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William Faulkner livre Absalom, Absalom!

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

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

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William Faulkner

"Beyond" (1933)

“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.”

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William Faulkner

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

“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.”

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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.”

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William Faulkner livre Light in August

Source: Light in August (1932), Chapter 2

“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.”

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William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

As I Lay Dying (1930)

“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.”

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William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

As I Lay Dying (1930)

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

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William Faulkner livre The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

“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.”

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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

“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.”

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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)

“Dont you see?”

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William Faulkner livre 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.”

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William Faulkner livre Go Down, Moses

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

“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.”

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William Faulkner

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

“… 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.”

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William Faulkner

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

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

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William Faulkner livre 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)

“Happens is never once.”

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William Faulkner livre 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.”

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William Faulkner

The Judge
"Beyond" (1933)

“...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.”

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William Faulkner livre Light in August

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

“Poor man. Poor mankind.”

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William Faulkner livre 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.”

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William Faulkner

"Mistral" (1931)

“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.”

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William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

As I Lay Dying (1930)

“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.”

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William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

As I Lay Dying (1930)

“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.”

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William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

As I Lay Dying (1930)

“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.”

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William Faulkner livre Tandis que j'agonise

As I Lay Dying (1930)

“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.”

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William Faulkner livre The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

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

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William Faulkner livre The Sound and the Fury

Jason to Caddy
The Sound and the Fury (1929)

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

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William Faulkner

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

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