William Faulkner

“Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.”

“Did you ever have a sister? did you?”

“The first harsh, sparse, swift drops rush through the leaves and across the ground in a long sigh, as though of relief from intolerable suspense.”

“I will never lie again.”

“I 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.”

“Ты зачем ему далась поцеловать зачем"Это не он а я сама хотела целоваться". И смотрит как меня охватывает злость Ага не нравится тебе! Алый отпечаток руки выступил на лице у нее будто свет рукой включили и глаза у нее заблестелиЯ не за то ударил что целовалась". Локти девичьи пятнадцать лет. Отец мне: "Ты глотаешь точно в горле у тебя застряла кость от рыбы Что это с тобой" Напротив меня Кэдди за столом и не смотрит на меня "А за то что ты с каким-то городским пшютиком вот за что Говори будешь еще Будешь Не хочешь сказать: не буду?" Алая ладонь и пальцы проступили на лице. Ага не нравится тебе Тычу ее лицом в стебли трав впечатались крест-накрест в горящую щеку: "Скажи не буду Скажи"А сам с грязной девчонкой целовался с Натали" Забор ушел в тень, и моя тень в воду.”

“Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.”

“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.”

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.”

“...lifeless and shockingly alien in that place where dissolution itself was a seething turmoil of ejaculation tumescence conception and birth, and death did not even exit.”

“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”

“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune”

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”

“Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.”

“Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.”

“You men,' she says. 'You durn men.”

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.”

“There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.”

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

“They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men - some in their brushed Confederate uniforms - on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”

“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”

“…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.”

“Idleness breeds our better virtues.”

“Caddy smelled like trees.”

“Who gathers the withered rose?”

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”

“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. ”

“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

“We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.”

“the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat”

“I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.”

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

“It surged up out of the water and stood for an instant upright upon that surging and heaving desolation like Christ.”

“I reckon I'll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won't ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who's got two cents to buy a stamp.”

“...if there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it...”

“When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.”

“So long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice...”

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”

“It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.”

“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 any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”

“I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.”

“You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”

“a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.”

“Wonder. Go on and wonder.”

“I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue...”

“He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.”

“War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.”