60 Top William Faulkner Quotes You Need To Know Today
Enjoy the best of William Faulkner quotes about time and other topics. Quotes by William Faulkner, American Writer.
1 You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
2 Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.
3 Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
4 Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner Quotes About Love
5 You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
7 Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
8 The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
9 Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
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10 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. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.
11 Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything good.
12 Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.
13 The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.
14 William Faulkner Quote About The Aim Of Artist
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
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15 There is no was.
16 My mother is a fish.
17 Wonder. Go on and wonder.
18 Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.
19 If a story is in you, it has to come out.
20 Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.
21 Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
22 Memory believes before knowing remembers.
23 The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
24 In writing, you must kill all your darlings.
25 If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
26 I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
27 The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
28 War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
29 The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
30 Unless you’re ashamed of yourself now and then, you’re not honest
31 Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.
32 It is the writer’s privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.
33 We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
34 How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
35 A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
36 I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
37 Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
38 She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
39 It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end
40 A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
41 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.
42 You can’t beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don’t even try to.
43 A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station
44 Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
45 A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune
46 It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you – religion, pride, anything – it’s when you realise that you don’t need any aid.
47 Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
48 Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar…
49 A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
50 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.
51 The next time you try to seduce anyone, don’t do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.
52 It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
53 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.
54 All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I’m convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t.
55 I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
56 I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.
57 He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that any more than for pride or fear….One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
58 I decline to accept the end of man… I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
59 You get born and you try this and you don’t know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can’t matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over.
60 In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is. How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
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