Quotes from William Faulkner

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

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.

Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

You don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Wonder. Go on and wonder.

He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. 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.

She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.

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...

Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.

Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.

Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.