William Faulkner Quotes

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.

Pointless... like giving caviar to an elephant.

A gentleman can live through anything.

My, my. A body does get around.

Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... 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.

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.

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.

I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Perhaps they were right in putting love into books...
Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

I will never lie again.

Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

'You men,' she says. 'You durn men.'

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest.

You can't beat women anyhow and if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

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

She wasn’t too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don’t know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instance with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew there would never be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do.

Love doesn't die; the men and women do.