William Faulkner Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

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.

he looked at her, stripped naked for the instant of verbiage and deceit.

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

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

Złudzeniami można żyć dość długo i być dość szczęśliwym. Może to nawet jedyny sposób, żeby być szczęśliwym. To znaczy, kiedy się jest Polakiem i nie umie się nic prócz zakładania dynamitu pięćset stóp pod ziemią.

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

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.

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.

Civilization begins with distillation

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.