William Faulkner Quotes - Page 3

I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora’s a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else.

... a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.

Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness.

It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.

I give it (grandfather's watch) to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.

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

War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

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

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

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.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

It's a comfortable thing, music is.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

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