Top 450 William Faulkner Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “El lenguaje es como la morfina.”

— William Faulkner

402. “So you see how much effort a man will make and trouble he will invent to guard and defend himself from the boredom of peace of mind. Or rather perhaps the pervert who deliberately infests himself with lice, not just for the simple pleasure of being rid of them again, since even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts; but because even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing, even lice.”

— William Faulkner

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “Learn us all the refinement and education that there’s a better use for the mouth than running private opinions through it.”

— William Faulkner

407. “That is the substance of remembering – sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less; and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.”

— William Faulkner

408. “And not only an architect, as General Compson said, but an artist since only an artist could have borne those two years in order to build a house which he doubtless not only expected but firmly intended never to see again.”

— William Faulkner

409. “Then alone, of all church gatherings, is there something of that peace which is the promise and the end of the Church. The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

411. “Read, read, read.”

— William Faulkner

412. “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

413. “No one individual can tell the truth.”

— William Faulkner

414. “I’ve done what I could; a man that can live as lone as I have and not know when to quit is a fool.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

416. “The bells were ringing again, high in the scudding sunlight in bright disorderly tatters of sound.”

— William Faulkner

417. “Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done.”

— William Faulkner

418. “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

419. “Time? Time? Why worry about something that takes care of itself so well? You were born with the habit of consuming time. Be satisfied with that.”

— William Faulkner

420. “The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.”

— William Faulkner

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

— William Faulkner

422. “Younger citizens of the town do not know him at all save as a tall, apparently strong and healthy man who loafs in a brooding, saturnine fashion wherever he will be allowed, never exactly accepted by any group.”

— William Faulkner

423. “Ellen was in her late thirties, plump, her face unblemished still. It was as though whatever marks being in the world had left upon it up to the time the aunt vanished had been removed from between the skeleton and the skin, between the sum of experience and the envelope in which it resides, by intervening years of annealing and untroubled flesh.”

— William Faulkner

424. “It is jealousy, I think, which makes us wish to prevent young people doing the things we had not the courage or the opportunity ourselves to accomplish once, and have not the power to do now.”

— William Faulkner

425. “Nothing can marry two people closer than a mutual sin in the world’s eyes.”

— William Faulkner

426. “You are suffering from disappointment. But this will pass away. The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.”

— William Faulkner

427. “Read anthing, trash or trashier; and listen to thrash. Espceially 83-90 era. They will absorb you. You will be in dire need of beer. Now that’s something you must be picky of.”

— William Faulkner

428. “Above the counter where the ranks of crisp shapes behind the glass her neat gray face her hair tight and sparse from her neat gray skull, spectacles in neat gray rims riding approaching like something on a wire, like a cash box in a store. She looked like a librarian. Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done.”

— William Faulkner

429. “The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He’s supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense in them, but he isn’t part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation.”

— William Faulkner

430. “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” – Wm. Faulkner.”

— William Faulkner

431. “But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, going. “Wait,” he said, talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: “Den lemme go wid you, honey.” But she was going.”

— William Faulkner

432. “That’s a very good way to learn the craft of writing – from reading.”

— William Faulkner

433. “He was wrong; he knew he was when it was too late for him to stop just as a drunkard reaches a point where it is too late for him to stop, where he promises himself that he will and maybe believes he will or can but it is too late.”

— William Faulkner

434. “A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.”

— William Faulkner

435. “But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia.”

— William Faulkner

436. “The orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs, with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered. “Catch it!” a voice shouted. They sprang forward, but the coffin crashed heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. “Play something!” the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; “play! Play!”

— William Faulkner

437. “Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago.”

— William Faulkner

438. “Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood – well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.”

— William Faulkner

439. “It does last,” Horace said. “Spring does. You’d almost think there was some purpose to it.”

— William Faulkner

440. “Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don’t. They don’t care what he said. They listens because of what he is.”

— William Faulkner

441. “It was not for an outrage that they grieved, but for simple grief: the only alternative to which was nothing, and between grief and nothing only the coward takes nothing.”

— William Faulkner

442. “He lived out there, eight miles from any neighbor, in a masculine solitude in what might be called the half-acre gunroom of a baronial splendor.”

— William Faulkner

443. “But peace is my heart: I know it is.”

— William Faulkner

444. “It’s a curious thing how no matter what’s wrong with you, a man’ll tell you to have your teeth examined and a woman’ll tell you to get married.”

— William Faulkner

445. “People will pay any price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles.”

— William Faulkner

446. “Because almost before he had even had time to think that, his uncle said, striding on, glib, familiar, quick, incorrigibly garrulous, incorrigibly discursive, who had always something curiously truthful yet always a little bizarre to say about almost anything that didn’t really concern him:.”

— William Faulkner

447. “The somebody you was young with and you growed old in her and she growed old in you, seeing the old coming in and it was one somebody you could hear say it don’t matter and know it was the truth outen the hard world ad all a man’s grief and trials.”

— William Faulkner

448. “I never said anything more. it doesn’t do any good. I’ve found that when a man gets into a rut the best thing you can do is let him stay there.”

— William Faulkner

449. “It’s Cash and Jewel and Varadaman and Dewey Del’, pa says kind of hangdog and proud too, with this teeth and all, even if he wouldn’t look at us. ‘Meet Mrs Bundren’, he says.”

— William Faulkner

450. “He began to breathe deep. He could feel himself breathing deep, as if each time his insides were afraid that next breath they would not be able to give far enough and that something terrible would happen, and that all the time he could look down at himself breathing, at his chest, and see no movement at all, like when dynamite first begins, gathers itself for the now Now NOW, the shape of the outside of the stick does not change.”

— William Faulkner