Top 450 William Faulkner Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so much work in the world.”

— William Faulkner

302. “There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I’m a vagabond and a tramp.”

— William Faulkner

303. “It was her wedding dress and it had a flare-out bottom, and they had laid her head to foot in it so the dress could spread out, and they had made her a veil out of a mosquito bar so the auger holes in her face wouldn’t show.”

— William Faulkner

304. “Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.”

— William Faulkner

305. “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

306. “A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.”

— William Faulkner

307. “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

308. “I love, I will accept no substitute;... ; if happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.”

— William Faulkner

309. “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

310. “The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

312. “The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

314. “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

315. “It wasn’t until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn’t understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.”

— William Faulkner

316. “You will find that even injustice is scarcely worthy of what you believe yourself to be.”

— William Faulkner

317. “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

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

— William Faulkner

319. “And so sometimes I would think how the devil had conquered God.”

— William Faulkner

320. “This world is not his world; this life his life.”

— William Faulkner

321. “It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.”

— William Faulkner

322. “The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

324. “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

— William Faulkner

325. “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

326. “Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.”

— William Faulkner

327. “I reckon a man in a tight might let Bill Varner patch him up like a mule, but I be damned if the man that’d let Anse Bundren treat him with raw cement aint got more spare legs than I have.”

— William Faulkner

328. “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

329. “Life wasn’t made to be easy on folks: they wouldn’t ever have any reason to be good and die.”

— William Faulkner

330. “He was working fast, yet thinking went slow enough. He knew why now. He knew now that thinking went slow and smooth with calculation, as oil is spread slowly upon a surface above a brewing storm.”

— William Faulkner

331. “It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.”

— William Faulkner

332. “She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it’s going to be in words.”

— William Faulkner

333. “It’s a comfortable thing, music is.”

— William Faulkner

334. “Man the sum of his climatic experiences.”

— William Faulkner

335. “There remains yet something of honor and pride, of life.”

— William Faulkner

336. “My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin.”

— William Faulkner

337. “I don’t mean a 1905 Republican – I don’t know what his Tennessee politics were, or if he had any – I mean a 1961 Republican. He was more: he was a Conservative. Like this: a Republican is a mad who made his money; a Liberal is a man who inherited his; a Democrat is a barefooted Liberal in a cross-country race; a Conservative is a Republican who has learned to read and write.”

— William Faulkner

338. “Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.”

— William Faulkner

339. “It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless.”

— William Faulkner

340. “She has had a hard life, but so does every woman.”

— William Faulkner

341. “Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Shirts. I thought all the time they were khaki, army issue khaki, until I saw they were of heavy Chinese silk or finest flannel because they made his face so brown his eyes so blue. Dalton Ames. It just missed gentility. Theatrical fixture. Just papier-mache, then touch. Oh. Asbestos. Not quite bronze.”

— William Faulkner

342. “I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is in my heart: I know it is. I have done things but neither better nor worse than them that pretend otherlike, and I know that Old Marster will care for me as for ere a sparrow that falls.”

— William Faulkner

343. “But Uncle Gavin says it don’t take many words to tell the sum of any human experience; that somebody has already done it in eight: He was born, he suffered and he died.”

— William Faulkner

344. “From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave him.”

— William Faulkner

345. “The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.”

— William Faulkner

346. “Like any good optimist, I don’t expect the worst to happen. Only, like any optimist worth his salt, I like to go and look as soon as possible afterward jest in case it did.”

— William Faulkner

347. “To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.”

— William Faulkner

348. “She thought of them, woolly, shapeless; savage, petulant, spoiled, the flatulent monotony of their sheltered lives snatched up without warning by an incomprehensible moment of terror and fear of bodily annihilation at the very hands which symbolised by ordinary the licensed tranquillity of their lives.”

— William Faulkner

349. “About women? When I say soldiers I don’t mean me. I wasn’t no soldier anymore than a man that fixes watches is a watchmaker. And when I say women I don’t mean you.”

— William Faulkner

350. “We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.”

— William Faulkner