Top 450 William Faulkner Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “It’s because I’m alone... If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.”

— William Faulkner

202. “I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.”

— William Faulkner

203. “She wouldn’t say what we both knew. ‘The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won’t you say it, even to yourself?’ She will not say it.”

— William Faulkner

204. “Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.”

— William Faulkner

205. “As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.”

— William Faulkner

206. “One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”

— William Faulkner

207. “So vast, so limitless in capacity is man’s imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.”

— William Faulkner

208. “The poets are almost always wrong about the facts. That’s because they’re not interested in the facts, only the truth.”

— William Faulkner

209. “That’s sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today.”

— William Faulkner

210. “A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”

— William Faulkner

211. “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

212. “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.”

— William Faulkner

213. “I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it.”

— William Faulkner

214. “The most important thing is insight, that is to be – curious – to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.”

— William Faulkner

215. “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

216. “When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there’s no holding me.”

— William Faulkner

217. “Here’s a wagon that’s going a piece of the way. It will take you that far; backrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as though through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.”

— William Faulkner

218. “Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?”

— William Faulkner

219. “I only write when the spirit moves me... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi.”

— William Faulkner

220. “But I aint so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.”

— William Faulkner

221. “When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.”

— William Faulkner

222. “The next time you try to seduce anyone, don’t do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.”

— William Faulkner

223. “And older still, he might have divined the true reason: that the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father’s being, as the element of steel or of powder spoke to other men, as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity.”

— William Faulkner

224. “In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it’s like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn’t matter and he said, That’s what’s so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That’s why that’s sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it...”

— William Faulkner

225. “We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.”

— William Faulkner

226. “The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.”

— William Faulkner

227. “Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.”

— William Faulkner

228. “It’s always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.”

— William Faulkner

229. “Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs.”

— William Faulkner

230. “Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.”

— William Faulkner

231. “It’s like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it for anything else very important.”

— William Faulkner

232. “Love doesn’t die; the men and women do.”

— William Faulkner

233. “The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.”

— William Faulkner

234. “And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.”

— William Faulkner

235. “I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.”

— William Faulkner

236. “Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.”

— William Faulkner

237. “I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.”

— William Faulkner

238. “Truth is one. It doesn’t change. It covers all things which touch the heart – honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love.”

— William Faulkner

239. “At night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank. After that I was bigger, older.”

— William Faulkner

240. “His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of his head, hard but without heat, exactly as he struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still without heat or anger.”

— William Faulkner

241. “I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It’s not that I wouldn’t and will not it’s that it is too soon too soon too soon.”

— William Faulkner

242. “You’re looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it’s hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.”

— William Faulkner

243. “And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it’s like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.”

— William Faulkner

244. “Only her eyes seem to move. It’s like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been there.”

— William Faulkner

245. “Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.”

— William Faulkner

246. “He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn’t smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.”

— William Faulkner

247. “There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.”

— William Faulkner

248. “It’s terrible to be young. It’s terrible. Terrible.”

— William Faulkner

249. “It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.”

— William Faulkner

250. “An old man is never at home save in his own garments: his own old thinking and beliefs; old hands and feet, elbow, knee, shoulder which he knows will fit.”

— William Faulkner