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William Faulkner quotes

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“My mother is a fish.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“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 anymore than for...” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“I could smell the cold.” William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is my heart: I know it is.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads; the light has turned copper: in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a...” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“she has travelled for four weeks with the untroubled unhaste of a change of season.” William Faulkner, Light in August
“when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?” William Faulkner, Light in August
“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“Life wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“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.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“That's what they mean by the love that passeth understanding: that pride, that furious desire to hide that abject nakedness which we bring here with us, carry with us into operating rooms, carry stubbornly and furiously with us into the earth again.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“Sometimes I lose faith in human nature for a time; I am assailed by doubt.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“Only her eyes seem to move. It's like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been there.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“It's like everything in the world for me is inside a tub full of guts, so that you wonder how there can be any room in it for anything else very important.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It's not that I wouldn't and will not it's that it is too soon too soon...” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“It's a comfortable thing, music is.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“He is looking down at her peaceful, rigid face fading into the dusk as though darkness were a precursor of the ultimate earth, until at last the face seems to float detached upon it, lightly as the reflection of a dead leaf.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
“a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.” William Faulkner, Light in August
“I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.” William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that...” William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“Perhaps they were right in putting love into books . . . Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.” William Faulkner, Light in August
“like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage.” William Faulkner, Light in August
“he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.” William Faulkner, Light in August
“a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune” William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move...” William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
“It is any man's privilege to destroy himself, so long as he does not injure anyone else, so long as he lives to and of himself” William Faulkner, Light in August
“Like so many cold, weak people, when faced at last by the incontrovertible disaster she exhumed from somewhere a sort of fortitude, strength.” William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“a man ain't so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.” William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Related topics

words damnation sin courage love death time cowardice religion action chaos mother prison home nostalgia fear life peace music heart

Related sources

As I Lay Dying (23)
Light in August (7)
The Sound and the Fury (5)
Absalom, Absalom! (1)