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William Faulkner Quotes - Page 15

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In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in

In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That's why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it.

William Faulkner
Father, Lying, Believe
William Faulkner (2016). “The Sound and the Fury (Third International Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)”, p.48, W. W. Norton & Company

ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

William Faulkner
Men, Order, Sound
William Faulkner (1972). “Light in August”, Vintage

Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.

William Faulkner
Passion, World, Purity

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

William Faulkner
Artist, Europe, America
William Faulkner (2006). “Novels, 1926-1929”

And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away

William Faulkner
Dog, Echoes, Air
William Faulkner “The Sound and the Fury”, W. W. Norton & Company

If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time

William Faulkner
Nice, Would Be, Ravel
William Faulkner (2000). “As I lay dying: the corrected text”, Random House Inc

That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

William Faulkner
Country, Men, Land
William Faulkner (1985). “Novels, 1930-1935”, Library of America

My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.

William Faulkner
Morning, Jobs, Writing

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.

William Faulkner
Book, Ambition, Effort
William Faulkner, Joseph Leo Blotner (1978). “Selected letters of William Faulkner”, Vintage

I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.

William Faulkner
Materials, Ifs, I Can

A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.

William Faulkner
Wind, Bird, Pairs
William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.254, Modern Library

A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

William Faulkner
Past, Simple, Men

She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.

William Faulkner
Spite, Incapable
William Faulkner “The Sound and the Fury”, W. W. Norton & Company

A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.

William Faulkner
Life, Thinking, Sorrow
William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.

William Faulkner
Air, Long, Sound
William Faulkner “The Sound and the Fury”, W. W. Norton & Company

Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones.

William Faulkner
Sleep, Bridges, Long
William Faulkner (1946). “The Sound and the Fury: And As I Lay Dying”, New York : The Modern library

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

William Faulkner
Children, Pride, Motherhood
William Faulkner (1954). “The Best of Faulkner”

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again.

William Faulkner
Writing, Heart, Men
Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, originally delivered December 10, 1950 in Stockholm Sweden

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
Book, Understanding, Literature
"Faulkner Without Fanfare". Esquire Magazine, July 1963.

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
Writing, Hot, Quitting

I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.

William Faulkner
Moving, Shadow, Looks

Idleness breeds our better virtues.

William Faulkner
Virtue, Idleness

Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.

William Faulkner
Looks, Aghast, Madness
William Faulkner (1936). “Absalom, Absalom!”, Random House (NY)

Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.

William Faulkner
Mean, Stories, Crafts

We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.

William Faulkner
Evil, Done, Littles
William Faulkner (2011). “FAULKNER READER”, p.172, Modern Library

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