Quotes from William Faulkner

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

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

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.

...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.

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.

A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.

The most important thing is insight, that is to be - curious - to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

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.

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.

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.

If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time

The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.

Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.

A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.

We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.

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.

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

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.