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Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!
A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don't square.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Mosquitoes
If there is a God what the hell is He for?
WILLIAM FAULKNER, As I Lay Dying
What makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Light in August
People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!
God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Go Down, Moses
A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Light in August
Husband and wife did not need to speak words to one another, not just from the old habit of living together but because in that one long-ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn't and couldn't last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Go Down, Moses
Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Paris Review, spring 1956
There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!
Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Paris Review, spring 1956
They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Light in August
Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!
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"
Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Paris Review, spring 1956
Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, "The Town"
Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!
Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Light in August
Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Paris Review, spring 1956
I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
The reason I don't like interviews is that I seem to react violently to personal questions. If the questions are about the work, I try to answer them. When they are about me, I may answer or I may not, but even if I do, if the same question is asked tomorrow, the answer may be different.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Paris Review, spring 1956
It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
No battle is ever won ... victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol — cross or crescent or whatever — that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach a man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral codes and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Paris Review, spring 1956
That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Light in August
A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Paris Review, spring 1956
Ah. That ceremony. I see. That's it, then. A formula, a shibboleth meaningless as a child's game, performed by someone created by the situation whose need it answered: a crone mumbling in a dungeon lighted by a handful of burning hair, something in a tongue which not even the girls themselves understand anymore, maybe not even the crone herself, rooted in nothing of economics for her or for any possible progeny since the very fact that we acquiesced, suffered the farce, was her proof and assurance of that which the ceremony itself could never enforce; vesting no new rights in anyone, denying to none the old--a ritual as meaningless as that of college boys in secret rooms at night, even to the same archaic and forgotten symbols?--you call that a marriage, when the night of a honeymoon and the casual business with a hired prostitute consists of the same suzerainty over a (temporarily) private room, the same order of removing the same clothes, the same conjunction in a single bed? Why not call that a marriage too?
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom, Absalom!
All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
WILLIAM FAULKNER, Light in August
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