Quotes By Author: william faulkner

“Time? Time? Why worry about something that takes care of itself so well? You were born with the habit of consuming time. Be satisfied with that.”

“Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness.”

“And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.”

“I give it (grandfather’s watch) to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”

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

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

“And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!) At last George Farr gave up trying to see her. He had ‘phoned vainly and time after time, at last the telephone became the end in place of the means: he had forgotten why he wanted to reach her. Finally he told himself that he hated her, that he would go away; finally he was going to as much pains to avoid her as he had been to see her. So he slunk about the streets like a criminal, avoiding her, feeling his his very heart stop when he did occasionally see her unmistakable body from a distance. And at night he lay sleepless and writhing to think of her, then to rise and don a few garments and walk past her darkened house, gazing in slow misery at the room in which he knew she lay, soft and warm, in intimate slumber, then to return to home and bed to dream of her brokenly.”

“I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora’s a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else.”

“You don’t dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.”

“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

“If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.”

“And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”

“ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.”

“I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.”