Quotes from William Faulkner

There remains yet something of honor and pride, of life.

Like a long sighing of wind in trees it begins, then they sweep into sight, borne now upon a cloud of phantom dust. They rush past, forwardleaning in the saddles, with brandished arms, beneath whipping ribbons from slanted and eager lances; with tumult and soundless yelling they sweep past like a tide whose crest is jagged with the wild heads of horses and the brandished arms of men like the crater of the world in explosion.

the young girl who slept waking in some suspension so completely physical as to resemble the state before birth and as far removed from reality's other extreme as Ellen was from hers

the town believed that good women dont forget things easily, good or bad, lest the taste and savor of forgiveness die from the palate of conscience.

it was just public opinion in an acute state of indigestion.

I'm fifty; all I know is that people nineteen years old will do anything, and that the only thing which makes the adult world at all safe from them is the fact that they are so preconceived of success that the simple desire and will are the finished accomplishment, that they pay no attention to mere dull mechanical details.

Here's a wagon that's going a piece of the way. It will take you that far; backrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as though through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.

I love, I will accept no substitute; ...; if happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.

The train could be stopped with a red flag, but by ordinary it appeared out of the devastated hills with apparitionlike suddenness and wailing like a banshee, athward and past that little less-than-village like a forgotten bead from a broken string.

the face which had long since forgotten how to be young and yet absolutely impenetrable, absolutely serene: no mourning, not even grief

I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is in my heart: I know it is. I have done things but neither better nor worse than them that pretend otherlike, and I know that Old Marster will care for me as for ere a sparrow that falls.

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant— a combined gardener and cook— had seen in at least ten years.

Only a fool tries to outsmart smart people, and anyone that tries to fool fools is himself already one.

dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.

The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long

I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.

I reckon a man in a tight might let Bill Varner patch him up like a mule, but I be damned if the man that'd let Anse Bundren treat him with raw cement aint got more spare legs than I have.

Maybe you have to know anybody awful well to love them but when you have hated somebody for forty-three years you will know them awful well so maybe it's better then maybe it's fine then because after forty-three years they cant any longer surprise you or make you either very contented or very mad.

Ou talvez quando se aceita alguma coisa, ela deixa realmente de importar, quer a gente queira quer não.

If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame... ... Only you and me then amid the pointing and the horror walled by the clean flame

She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

Quién pagaría una buena cantidad por una virginidad que no puede violar más tarde, aunque solo fuera para asegurarse de que era auténtica?

Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

A novelist is a failed short story writer, and a short story writer is a failed poet.