William Faulkner

“It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy…

— William Faulkner

“It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose…

— William Faulkner

“Oh,” he said. “I see.” But he did not see, exactly, though he believed that he could have been wrong and that…

— William Faulkner

Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.

— William Faulkner

Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes…

— William Faulkner

“the town believed that good women dont forget things easily, good or bad, lest the taste and savor of forgiveness die from…

— William Faulkner

“Quentin did not answer, staring at the window; then he could not tell if it was the actual window or the window's…

— William Faulkner

In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.

— William Faulkner

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

— William Faulkner

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly…

— William Faulkner

Our tragedy is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it... the basest…

— William Faulkner

When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.

— William Faulkner

It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight…

— William Faulkner

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

— William Faulkner

Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

— William Faulkner

“I am not religious, I reckon. But peace is in my heart: I know it is.”

— William Faulkner

“I lied," I said. ... "I know it," he said. "Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something." "I…

— William Faulkner

I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont…

— William Faulkner

“Read it if you like or don't read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get…

— William Faulkner

“It's Cash and Jewel and Varadaman and Dewey Del', pa says kind of hangdog and proud too, with this teeth and all,…

— William Faulkner

“Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.”

— William Faulkner

People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.

— William Faulkner

“...the very old men [...] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression,…

— William Faulkner

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the…

— William Faulkner

It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn…

— William Faulkner