Quotes from William Faulkner

I was wrong. I admit it. I believed that there were things which still mattered just because they had mattered once. But I was wrong. Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

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.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.

It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible

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.

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.

To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know; I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.

I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue...

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

I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

Civilization begins with distillation