Top 450 William Faulkner Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— William Faulkner

154. “Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you.”

— William Faulkner

155. “We had long thought of them as a tableau; Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a straddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.”

— William Faulkner

156. “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

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

— William Faulkner

158. “And then he died. He did not know he was dead.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

160. “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

161. “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

162. “Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.”

— William Faulkner

163. “Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything.”

— William Faulkner

164. “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

166. “It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

— William Faulkner

167. “And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.”

— William Faulkner

168. “I don’t care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can’t stand a fact up, you’ve got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it’s not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.”

— William Faulkner

169. “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.”

— William Faulkner

170. “What a writer’s obituary should read – he wrote the books, then he died.”

— William Faulkner

171. “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”

— William Faulkner

172. “I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn’t even lie.”

— William Faulkner

173. “Because I said will I or won’t I when the sack was half-full because I said if the sack is full when we get to the woods it won’t be me. I said if it don’t mean for me to do it the sack will not be full and I will turn up the next row but if the sack is full, I cannot help it. It will be that I had to do it all the time and I cannot help it. And we picked on toward the secret shade and our eyes would drown together touching on his hands and my hands and I didn’t say anything.”

— William Faulkner

174. “Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?”

— William Faulkner

175. “Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar. Man the sum of his climatic experiences Father said. 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

176. “Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.”

— William Faulkner

177. “The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.”

— William Faulkner

178. “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.”

— William Faulkner

179. “The destiny of the land, the nation, the South, the State, the County, was already whirling into the plunge of its precipice, not that the State and the South knew it, because the first seconds of fall always seem like soar.”

— William Faulkner

180. “That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.”

— William Faulkner

181. “The three quarters began. The first note sounded, measured and tranquil, serenely peremptory, emptying the unhurried silence for the next one and that’s it if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up for an instant then blown cleanly out along the cool eternal dark instead of lying there trying not to think of the swing until all cedars came to have that vivid dead smell of perfume that Benjy hated so.”

— William Faulkner

182. “War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.”

— William Faulkner

183. “Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.”

— William Faulkner

184. “If there is a God what the hell is He for?”

— William Faulkner

185. “On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.”

— William Faulkner

186. “Poor man. Poor mankind.”

— William Faulkner

187. “Don Quixote – I read that every year, as some do the Bible.”

— William Faulkner

188. “She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.”

— William Faulkner

189. “In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.”

— William Faulkner

190. “Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.”

— William Faulkner

191. “That’s what they mean by the love that passeth understanding: that pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us, carry with us into operating rooms, carry stubbornly and furiously with us into the earth again.”

— William Faulkner

192. “The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.”

— William Faulkner

193. “Forget grief. Only an idiot has no grief, and only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?”

— William Faulkner

194. “A man’s moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.”

— William Faulkner

195. “When we saw her again her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows – sort of tragic and serene.”

— William Faulkner

196. “When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar.”

— William Faulkner

197. “The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.”

— William Faulkner

198. “I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.”

— William Faulkner

199. “Did you ever have a sister? did you?”

— William Faulkner

200. “I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.”

— William Faulkner