Quotes from William Faulkner

Addie: My father said that the reason for living is getting ready to stay dead.

I'd have to listen to somebody - artist or shoe clerk. And the artist is more entertaining because he knows less about what he is trying to do.

For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it won't stand a whole lot of racking. It's best when it all runs along the same, doing the day's work and not no one part used no more than needful. … But I reckon Cora's right when she says the reason the Lord had to create women is because man don't know his own good when he see it.

God is foolish at times, but at least He's a gentleman. Don't you know that?

CiteÅŸte, citeÅŸte, citeÅŸte. CiteÅŸte totul — gunoi, clasicii, r?ii ÅŸi bunii, ÅŸi vezi cum scriu. La fel ca un tâmplar care lucreaz? ca ucenic ÅŸi îÅŸi studiaz? maestrul. CiteÅŸte! Vei absorbi asta. Apoi scrie. Dac? ai scris ceva bun, vei afla. Dac? nu, arunc? ce-ai scris pe fereastr?.

the father who is the natural enemy of any son and son-in-law of whom the mother is the ally, just as after the wedding the father will be the ally of the actual son-in-law who has for mortal foe the mother of his wife.

You cannot swim for new horizons unless you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

the idea (not mine: your great-grandfather's) being that even at eleven a man should already have behind him one year of paying for, assuming responsibility for, the space he occupied, the room he took up, in the world's (Jefferson, Mississippi's, anyway) economy.

We will establish a new land where man can assume that every individual man—not the mass of men but individual men—has inalienable right to individual dignity and freedom within a fabric of individual courage and honorable work and mutual responsibility.

Just like folks. Put off as long as she could having to be brave, knowing all the time that sooner or later she would have to be brave once so she could keep on calling herself a dog, and knowing beforehand what was going to happen when she done it.

I reckon she's right. I reckon if there's ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man's good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.

it was as if he had swung outward at the end of a grape vine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time.