Top 450 William Faulkner Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.”

— William Faulkner

102. “Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.”

— William Faulkner

103. “I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.”

— William Faulkner

104. “She was the captain of her soul.”

— William Faulkner

105. “It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.”

— William Faulkner

106. “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

107. “Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.”

— William Faulkner

108. “I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I’m going to give her. That’s the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.”

— William Faulkner

109. “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.”

— William Faulkner

110. “My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.”

— William Faulkner

111. “All the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

113. “Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.”

— William Faulkner

114. “My, my. A body does get around.”

— William Faulkner

115. “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.”

— William Faulkner

116. “I decline to accept the end of man.”

— William Faulkner

117. “There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.”

— William Faulkner

118. “There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.”

— William Faulkner

119. “You can’t. You just have to.”

— William Faulkner

120. “All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.”

— William Faulkner

121. “Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.”

— William Faulkner

122. “The salvation of the world is in man’s suffering.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

125. “All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.”

— William Faulkner

126. “She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.”

— William Faulkner

127. “Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.”

— William Faulkner

128. “I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.”

— William Faulkner

129. “The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.”

— William Faulkner

130. “Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.”

— William Faulkner

131. “Listen to the voices.”

— William Faulkner

132. “We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!”

— William Faulkner

133. “You’re not being tried by common sense,” Horace said. “You’re being tried by a jury.”

— William Faulkner

134. “You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it.”

— William Faulkner

135. “Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death.”

— William Faulkner

136. “War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.”

— William Faulkner

137. “Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man’s but all men’s, as light and air and weather were.”

— William Faulkner

138. “With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what caused it to follow.”

— William Faulkner

139. “Nothing can injure a man’s writing if he’s a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there’s not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.”

— William Faulkner

140. “There is no such thing as was – only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”

— William Faulkner

141. “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

142. “How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.”

— William Faulkner

143. “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 of the ones 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.”

— William Faulkner

144. “The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.”

— William Faulkner

145. “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.”

— William Faulkner

146. “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.”

— William Faulkner

147. “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”

— William Faulkner

148. “It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you – religion, pride, anything – it’s when you realise that you don’t need any aid.”

— William Faulkner

149. “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.”

— William Faulkner

150. “People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do; I don’t mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.”

— William Faulkner