William Faulkner Quotes

You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

Fear is the most damnable damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.

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

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.

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

I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat clean quite solvent business.

I will never lie again.

It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.

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

If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

One of the saddest things is the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day day after day is work. You can't eat 8 hours a day nor drink for 8 hours a day nor make love for 8 hours.

I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.

When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.

Stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows.

When it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.

Wanton stars galloped neighing like unicorns in blue meadows.

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.

Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

The past is never dead-it is not even past.

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

And when a man that old takes up money-hunting, it's like when he takes up gambling or whisky or women. He aint going to have time to quit.

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

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

The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.

What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here, ' on the last wall of the universe.

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.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.

So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice...

Memory believes before knowing remembers.[Light in August]

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.

Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

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.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.

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.

And so sometimes I would think how the devil had conquered God.

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.