02UndatedThe 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.William Faulkner / quote ↗
03UndatedPeople to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.William Faulkner / quote ↗
04UndatedHe 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 pride or fear.William Faulkner / quote ↗
05UndatedWomen know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.William Faulkner / quote ↗
06UndatedMost of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.William Faulkner / quote ↗
07UndatedWomen do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.William Faulkner / quote ↗
08UndatedIf all the businesses in town are run like country businesses, You are going to have a country townWilliam Faulkner / quote ↗
10UndatedIt is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.William Faulkner / quote ↗
11UndatedPeople. They're really innately, inherently gentle and compassionate and kind. That's what wrings, wrenches...something. Your entrails, maybe. The member of the mob who holds up the whole ceremony for seconds or even minutes while he dislodges a family of bugs or lizards from the log he is about to put on the fire.William Faulkner / quote ↗
12Undated[B]ecause the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and anytime you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.William Faulkner / quote ↗
13UndatedAll of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.William Faulkner / quote ↗
14UndatedSome 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.William Faulkner / quote ↗
15UndatedAt one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is ... curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don't think the talent makes much difference, whether you've got that oWilliam Faulkner / quote ↗
16UndatedI know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.William Faulkner / quote ↗
17UndatedWhen it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get.William Faulkner / quote ↗
18UndatedThe orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs, with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered. "Catch it!" a voice shouted. They sprang forward, but the coffin crashed heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. "Play something!" the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; "play! Play!William Faulkner / quote ↗
19UndatedI don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.William Faulkner / quote ↗
20UndatedA writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.William Faulkner / quote ↗
21UndatedOnly Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This--the actual pistols--was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.William Faulkner / quote ↗
22UndatedA hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe."(on Mark Twain)William Faulkner / quote ↗
23UndatedI can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.William Faulkner / quote ↗
24UndatedThe razor hung between his shoulder-blades from a loop of cotton string round his neck inside his shirt. The same motion of the hand which brought the razor forward over his shoulder flipped the blade open and freed it from the cord, the blade opening on until the back edge of it lay across the knuckles of his fist, his thumb pressing the handle into his closing fingers, so that in the second before the half-drawn pistol exploded he actually struck at the white man's throat not with the blade but with a sweeping blow of his fist, following through in the same motion so that not even the first jet of blood touched his hand or arm.William Faulkner / quote ↗
