Quotes from William Faulkner

Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

She wasn't born for this kind of life. You have to be born for this like you have to be born a butcher or a barber, I guess. Wouldn't anybody be either of them just for money or fun.

My pistol is a fawty-one Colt,' Lucas said. Which it would be; the only thing he hadn't actually known was the calibre—that weapon workable and efficient and well cared for yet as archaic peculiar and unique as the gold toothpick, which had probably (without doubt) been old Carothers McCaslin's pride a half century ago. 'All right,' he said. 'Then what?' 'He wasn't shot with no fawty-one Colt.

Hush, now, she said, stroking his head. Hush. Dilsey got you. But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sound.

man is man, enduring and immortal; enduring not because he is immortal but immortal because he endures

Then alone, of all church gatherings, is there something of that peace which is the promise and the end of the Church. The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope.

Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.

And that wasn't the first time it ever occurred to me that this world ain't run like it ought to be run a heap of more times than what it is.

I kept thinking that. I don't know why it is I can't seem to learn that a woman'll do anything.

and he every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans wellbeing and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair its not even time

and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Sólo el campo de batalla revela al hombre su propia locura y desesperación y la victoria es ilusión de filósofos e idiotas.

I don't like the climate, the people, their way of life. Nothing ever happens and then one morning you wake up and find that you are 65.

The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.

Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

the very old men [...] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

Younger citizens of the town do not know him at all save as a tall, apparently strong and healthy man who loafs in a brooding, saturnine fashion wherever he will be allowed, never exactly accepted by any group.

the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

Burden … began to read to the child in Spanish from the book which he had brought with him from California, interspersing the fine, sonorous flowing of mysticism in a foreign tongue with harsh, extemporized dissertations composed half of the bleak and bloodless logic which he remembered from his father on interminable New England Sundays, and half of immediate hellfire and tangible brimstone of which any country Methodist circuit rider would have been proud.

IT WAS JUST NOON that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.

Qué estrella cae sin que nadie la mire?

He turned into the road at that slow and ponderous gallop, the two of them, man and beast, leaning a little stiffly forward as though in some juggernautish simulation of terrific speed though the actual speed itself was absent, as if in that cold and implacable and undeviating conviction of both omnipotence and clairvoyance of which they both partook known destination and speed were not necessary.

So this is love. I see. I was wrong about it too', thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact