William Faulkner Quotes
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101. “Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.”

— William Faulkner

102. “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

103. “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

104. “All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

107. “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

108. “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

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

111. “You can’t. You just have to.”

— William Faulkner

112. “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

113. “Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

115. “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

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

122. “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

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice...”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

133. “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

134. “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

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

— William Faulkner

136. “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

137. “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

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

— William Faulkner

139. “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

140. “Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.”

— William Faulkner

141. “For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.”

— William Faulkner

142. “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

143. “Only a fool tries to outsmart smart people, and anyone that tries to fool fools is himself already one.”

— William Faulkner

144. “Every man has a different idea of what’s beautiful, and it’s best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.”

— William Faulkner

145. “To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.”

— William Faulkner

146. “We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it’s not always.”

— William Faulkner

147. “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

— William Faulkner

148. “I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.”

— William Faulkner

149. “It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.”

— William Faulkner

150. “People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”

— William Faulkner