Quotes from William Faulkner

When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.

But I aint so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

You will find that even injustice is scarcely worthy of what you believe yourself to be.

So the next day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing.

that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgement and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realizing that actually you cannot, that actually it is the stronger.

Hello sister. Her face was like a cup of milk dashed with coffee in the sweet warm emptiness. [...] She looked like a librarian. Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done.

Because always,' he thinks, 'when anything gets to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance away from truth and fact.

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

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. That was when I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.

He was as calm as a god who has seen both life and death, and seen nothing of particular importance in either of them.

It's a curious thing how no matter what's wrong with you, a man'll tell you to have your teeth examined and a woman'll tell you to get married.

the listening part is afraid that there may not be time to say it. Dewey Dell - As I Lay Dying.

It was like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time, not for material gain but for principle—honor denied with honor, courage denied with courage—the deed done not for the end but for the sake of the doing, put to the ultimate test and proving nothing save the finality of death and the vanity of all endeavor.

in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.

There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces it's gone now and I'm sick

Again. Sadder than was. Again. Saddest of all. Again.

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

At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were.

A dream is not a very safe thing to be near, Bayard. 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. There are not many dreams in the world, but there are a lot of human lives. And one human life or two dozen——" "Are not worth anything?" "No. Not anything.—Listen.

Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar. Man the sum of his climatic experiences Father said. Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire. but now I know I'm dead I tell you

There are worse things than killing men, Bayard. There are worse things than being killed. Sometimes I think the finest thing that can happen to a man is to love something, a woman preferably, well, hard hard hard, then to die young because he believed what he could not help but believe and was what he could not (could not? would not) help but be.

the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.

Mississippi begins in the lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee, hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.

When they get done sending you to Parchman you'll have plenty of time between working cotton and corn you aint going to get no third and fourth of even, to study it. They looked at one another. Yes sir, George said. 'Especially wid you there to help me worry hit out.