Quotes from William Faulkner

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.

My pistol is a fawty-one Colt,' Lucas said. Which it would be; the only thing he hadn't actually known was the calibre—that weapon workable and efficient and well cared for yet as archaic peculiar and unique as the gold toothpick, which had probably (without doubt) been old Carothers McCaslin's pride a half century ago. 'All right,' he said. 'Then what?' 'He wasn't shot with no fawty-one Colt.

Then alone, of all church gatherings, is there something of that peace which is the promise and the end of the Church. The mind and the heart purged then, if it is ever to be; the week and its whatever disasters finished and summed and expiated by the stern and formal fury of the morning service; the next week and its whatever disasters not yet born, the heart quiet now for a little while beneath the cool soft blowing of faith and hope.

Nothing matters but breath, breathing, to know and to be alive.

I kept thinking that. I don't know why it is I can't seem to learn that a woman'll do anything.

IT WAS JUST NOON that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.

So this is love. I see. I was wrong about it too', 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.

When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.

that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgement and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realizing that actually you cannot, that actually it is the stronger.

Because always,' he thinks, 'when anything gets to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance away from truth and fact.

the listening part is afraid that there may not be time to say it. Dewey Dell - As I Lay Dying.

Government was founded on the working premiss of being primarily an asylum for ineptitude and indigence.