Top 450 William Faulkner Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

303. “Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.”

— William Faulkner

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— William Faulkner

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— William Faulkner

321. “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

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

— William Faulkner

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

328. “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

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

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

331. “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

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

— William Faulkner

333. “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

334. “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

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

— William Faulkner

336. “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

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

— William Faulkner

338. “If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

340. “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

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

— William Faulkner

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

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

— William Faulkner

345. “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

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

— William Faulkner

347. “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.”

— William Faulkner

348. “I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent of that folly you will never learn.”

— William Faulkner

349. “And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he’s durn nigh hopeless.”

— William Faulkner

350. “Beyond the bordering weeds a fence strangled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds beside it the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed there – skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they.”

— William Faulkner