William Faulkner Quotes
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351. “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

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

— William Faulkner

353. “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

354. “Innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent; innocent because it foreknows all and therefore doesn’t have to fear and be afraid.”

— William Faulkner

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Let the past abolish the past when – and if – it can substitute something better.”

— William Faulkner

358. “She accepted that – not reconciled: accepted – as though there is a breathing-point in outrage when you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, ’thank God, this is all; at least I now know all of it –.”

— William Faulkner

359. “I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man’s abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.”

— William Faulkner

360. “And that wasn’t the first time it ever occurred to me that this world ain’t run like it ought to be run a heap of more times than what it is.”

— William Faulkner

361. “The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience.”

— William Faulkner

362. “I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.”

— William Faulkner

363. “Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written.”

— William Faulkner

364. “When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.”

— William Faulkner

365. “The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long.”

— William Faulkner

366. “I write when I am inspired and I make sure I am inspired every day.”

— William Faulkner

367. “He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.”

— William Faulkner

368. “I was a little crazy. You know how it is, how you want to rush into something you know is going to happen, no matter what it is. I guess lovers and suicides both know that feeling.”

— William Faulkner

369. “The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.”

— William Faulkner

370. “It was like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time, not for material gain but for principle – honor denied with honor, courage denied with courage – the deed done not for the end but for the sake of the doing, put to the ultimate test and proving nothing save the finality of death and the vanity of all endeavor.”

— William Faulkner

371. “He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speed were not necessary.”

— William Faulkner

372. “Then it wasn’t and she was, and now it is and she wasn’t.”

— William Faulkner

373. “When ideas come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t.”

— William Faulkner

374. “But who knows why a man, though suffering, clings, above all the other well members, to the arm or leg which he knows must come off?”

— William Faulkner

375. “Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock.”

— William Faulkner

376. “I don’t like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65.”

— William Faulkner

377. “I am too old for this. I was born too old for it, and so I am sick to death for quiet.”

— William Faulkner

378. “I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain’s surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized.”

— William Faulkner

379. “A dream is not a very safe thing to be near, Bayard. I know; I had one once. It’s like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it’s a good dream, it’s worth it. There are not many dreams in the world, but there are a lot of human lives. And one human life or two dozen – – ” “Are not worth anything?” “No. Not anything. – Listen.”

— William Faulkner

380. “Yes, urge I do: warped chrysalis of what blind perfect seed: for who shall say what gnarled forgotten root might not bloom yet with some globed concentrate more globed and concentrate and heady-perfect because the neglected root was planted warped and lay not dead but merely slept forgot?”

— William Faulkner

381. “The quality an artist must have is objectivity in judging his work, plus the honesty and courage not to kid himself about it.”

— William Faulkner

382. “Yes, we laughed, because I have learned this at least during these four years, that it really requires an empty stomach to laugh with, that only when you are hungry or frightened do you extract some ultimate essence out of laughing just as the empty stomach extracts the ultimate essence out of alcohol.”

— William Faulkner

383. “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

— William Faulkner

384. “Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that–but ask the tear ducts if they have forgotten how to weep.”

— William Faulkner

385. “The artists who want to be writers, read the reviews; the artists who want to write, don’t.”

— William Faulkner

386. “Nowadays he drove the car into town to fetch his grandfather from habit alone, and though he still considered forty five miles an hour merely cruising speed, he no longer took cold and fiendish pleasure in turning curves on two wheels or in detaching mules from wagons by striking the whiffle-trees with his bumper in passing.”

— William Faulkner

387. “Then that had passed. It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books;.”

— William Faulkner

388. “Meet Mrs. Bundren, he says.”

— William Faulkner

389. “If somebody tole you, hit could be a lie. But if you dream hit, hit can’t be a lie case ain’t nobody there to tole hit to you.”

— William Faulkner

390. “It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.”

— William Faulkner

391. “It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.”

— William Faulkner

392. “I don’t think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don’t know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it – you can’t teach it.”

— William Faulkner

393. “He’s crossed all the oceans all around the world.”

— William Faulkner

394. “Then she too seemed to blow out of his life on the long wind like a third scrap of paper.”

— William Faulkner

395. “El lenguaje es como la morfina.”

— William Faulkner

396. “Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable – -And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks.”

— William Faulkner

397. “All right. What do you want me to do?’ ‘Go out there and look at him,’ Lucas said. ‘Go out where and look at who?’ he said. But he understood all right. It seemed to him that he had known all the time what it would be; he thought with a kind of relief So that’s all it is even while his automatic voice was screeching with outraged disbelief: ‘Me? Me?”

— William Faulkner

398. “Read, read, read.”

— William Faulkner

399. “Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.”

— William Faulkner

400. “I prefer to think that no writer has got time to be too concerned with style, that he is simply telling this dramatic instance in the most effective way he knows, that the book, the story, creates its own style.”

— William Faulkner