William Faulkner Quotes
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251. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

— William Faulkner

252. “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

253. “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.”

— William Faulkner

254. “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

255. “I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.”

— William Faulkner

256. “There was something about his wolflike independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral which impressed strangers, as if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his.”

— William Faulkner

257. “We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won’t.”

— William Faulkner

258. “And so if Cash nails the box up, she is not a rabbit.”

— William Faulkner

259. “Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.”

— William Faulkner

260. “He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.”

— William Faulkner

261. “I don’t want money badly enough to work for it.”

— William Faulkner

262. “Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.”

— William Faulkner

263. “Once I waked with a black void rushing under me.”

— William Faulkner

264. “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

265. “Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.”

— William Faulkner

266. “When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.”

— William Faulkner

267. “This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.”

— William Faulkner

268. “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

269. “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

270. “Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.”

— William Faulkner

271. “It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.”

— William Faulkner

272. “They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”

— William Faulkner

273. “If you are going to write, write about human nature. That is the only thing that doesn’t date.”

— William Faulkner

274. “Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up.”

— William Faulkner

275. “This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.”

— William Faulkner

276. “In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so much work in the world.”

— William Faulkner

277. “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

278. “In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

280. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”

— William Faulkner

281. “He puts his shoes on, stomping into them, like he does everything, like he is hoping all the time he really cant do it and can quit trying to.”

— William Faulkner

282. “Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.”

— William Faulkner

283. “I said I have committed incest father I said.”

— William Faulkner

284. “So the next day we all said, “She will kill herself”; and we said it would be the best thing.”

— William Faulkner

285. “A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.”

— William Faulkner

286. “He had been too successful, you see; his was that solitude of contempt and distrust which success brings to him who gained it because he was strong instead of merely lucky.”

— William Faulkner

287. “Amid the pointing and the horror, the clean flame.”

— William Faulkner

288. “I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is; I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.”

— William Faulkner

289. “Hemingway shot himself. I don’t like a man that takes the short way home.”

— William Faulkner

290. “Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.”

— William Faulkner

291. “This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen: this Niobe without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all.”

— William Faulkner

292. “The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene...”

— William Faulkner

293. “A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don’t square.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

295. “Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.”

— William Faulkner

296. “Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.”

— William Faulkner

297. “You don’t dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.”

— William Faulkner

298. “Hush, now”, she said, stroking his head. “Hush. Dilsey got you.” But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sound.”

— William Faulkner

299. “He just stood and looked at his dying mother, his heart too full for words.”

— William Faulkner

300. “In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it’s an excuse for a form of behavior.”

— William Faulkner