Quotes from book
The Mansion

Name: The Mansion
Author: William Faulkner

The Mansion is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1959. It is the last in a trilogy of books about the fictional Snopes family of Mississippi, following The Hamlet and The Town.

“Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity.”

William Faulkner book The Mansion

Gavin Stevens in Ch. 6
The Mansion (1959)

“…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.”

William Faulkner book The Mansion

Source: The Mansion (1959), Ch. 16

“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)

“…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)

“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)

“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)