Quotes from William Faulkner

Dajem ti sat, ne da se prise?aš vremena, ve? da bi ga ponekad mogao na trenutak zaboraviti, da ne izgubiš dah pokušavaju?i da ga osvojiš. Jer bitke se nikad ne dobijaju. ?ak se i ne biju. Bojno polje samo otkriva ?oveku njegovu ludost i o?ajanje, a pobeda je uvek samo iluzija filozofa i glupaka... Moglo bi se pomisliti da ?e se nesre?a jednog dana umoriti, ali onda samo vreme postaje naša nesre?a.

Father said you swallow like you had a fishbone in your throat...

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.

So that's it, he said. Three hundred dollars. I wish somebody would come into this country with a seed that had to be worked everyday from New Year's right on through Christmas. As soon as you niggers are laid-by, trouble starts.

Because almost before he had even had time to think that, his uncle said, striding on, glib, familiar, quick, incorrigibly garrulous, incorrigibly discursive, who had always something curiously truthful yet always a little bizarre to say about almost anything that didn't really concern him:

In the army, you dont ask what you are going to do: you just do it. In fact, the way to get along in any army is never even to wonder why they want something done or what they are going to do with it after it's finished, but just do it and then get out of sight so that they cant just happen to see you by accident and then think up something for you to do, but instead they will have to have thought up something to be done, and then hunt for somebody to do it.

I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

curiosity is another of the mistresses whose slaves decline no sacrifice.

Yes, urge I do: warped chrysalis of what blind perfect seed: for who shall say what gnarled forgotten root might not bloom yet with some globed concentrate more globed and concentrate and heady-perfect because the neglected root was planted warped and lay not dead but merely slept forgot?

This world is not his world; this life his life.

The somebody you was young with and you growed old in her and she growed old in you, seeing the old coming in and it was one somebody you could hear say it don't matter and know it was the truth outen the hard world ad all a man's grief and trials.

When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not yet be old enough to desire the fruits of it, which is not innocence but appetite; his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it, which is not ignorance but size.