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70d1ed5
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Well, Bud," he said, looking at me, "I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?"
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friendship
best-friends
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William Faulkner |
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4789109
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It does not take long. Soon the fine galloping language, the gutless swooning full of sapless trees and dehydrated lusts begins to swim smooth and swift and peaceful. It is better than praying without having to bother to think aloud. It is like listening in a cathedral to a eunuch chanting in a language which he does not even need to not understand.
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reading
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William Faulkner |
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6b5e1c9
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Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite ..
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time
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William Faulkner |
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30d6a5b
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It was too late. Maybe yesterday, while I was still a child, but not now. I knew too much, had seen too much, I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.
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growing-up
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William Faulkner |
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b27d881
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If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame... Only you and me amid the pointing and the horror walled by the clean flame.
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William Faulkner |
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8ec6053
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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.
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William Faulkner |
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a969bcd
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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.
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William Faulkner |
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bb56731
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When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in cedar trees smells. It has to set at least six hours, and be drunk from a gourd. Water should never be drunk from metal. And at night it is better still. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the buck..
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William Faulkner |
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f41adb5
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And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away
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William Faulkner |
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fce4f47
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On the instant when we come to realize that tragedy is second-hand.
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William Faulkner |
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b854f0b
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I lied," I said. ... "I know it," he said. "Then do something about it. Do anything, just so it's something." "I cant," he said. "There aint anything to do? Not anything?" "I didn't say that," Grandfather said. "I said I couldn't. You can." "What?" I said. "How can I forget it? Tell me how to." "You cant," he said. "Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable." "Then what can I do?" "Live with it," Grandfather said. "..
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lying
forgiving-the-past
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William Faulkner |
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a49a514
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Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.
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William Faulkner |
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96a37a8
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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 don't try to hold him, that he cant escape from
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William Faulkner |
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3046538
|
I can stand on my own feet; I don't need any man's mahogany desk to prop me up
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William Faulkner |
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8b3e0de
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I said You don't know what worry is. I don't know what it is. I don't know whether I am worrying or not. Whether I can or not . I don't know whether I can cry or not. I don't know whether I have tried to or not. I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
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William Faulkner |
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e714e31
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I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy man.
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William Faulkner |
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9faf36a
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Caddy put her arms around me, and her shining veil, and I couldn't smell trees anymore and I began to cry.
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the-sound-and-the-fury
william-faulkner
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William Faulkner |
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4a70333
|
Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.
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women
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William Faulkner |
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2cdc166
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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.
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William Faulkner |
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61e2a6e
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I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that's why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good cant. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being goo..
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goodness
price
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William Faulkner |
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a6eb942
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women will show pride and honor about almost anything except love ...
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pride
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William Faulkner |
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2b50369
|
Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones.
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William Faulkner |
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5ec9548
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Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This--the actual pistols--was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.
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manuscripts
southerners
writers
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William Faulkner |
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315843a
|
Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not
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William Faulkner |
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36bfd49
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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 anymore than for pride or fear.
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William Faulkner |
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6019c24
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Bad health is the primary reason for all life. Created by disease, within putrefaction, into decay
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William Faulkner |
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e7fdf8a
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it takes an awful lot of character to quit anything when you are losing,
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William Faulkner |
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e6e763c
|
A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.
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William Faulkner |
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5868731
|
What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.
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memories
making-your-mark
mementos
notice
oblivion
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William Faulkner |
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592d5c8
|
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.
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William Faulkner |
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cc9e862
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If Jesus returned today we would have to crucify him quick in our own defense, to justify and preserve the civilization we have worked and suffered and died shrieking and cursing in rage and impotence and terror for two thousand years to create and perfect in mans own image; if Venus returned she would be a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards--
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William Faulkner |
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959372b
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I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain's surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized
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William Faulkner |
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9b1a79a
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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. And when I would have to look at them day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times w..
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William Faulkner |
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2777501
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That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today
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William Faulkner |
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7031c5e
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Then the town was sorry with being glad, as people sometimes are sorry for those whom they have at last forced to do as they wanted them to.
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William Faulkner |
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15182d1
|
That is the substance of remembering--sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less; and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.
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William Faulkner |
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1947b90
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When it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get.
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William Faulkner |
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c3459d5
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What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. That was it: cool; he was thinking, saying aloud to himself sometimes, "I better move. I better get away from here." But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia."
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William Faulkner |
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30471eb
|
you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead and I temporary and he you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this
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William Faulkner |
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aff6083
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Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.
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William Faulkner |
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38d259c
|
The river itself is not a hundred yards across, and pa and Vernon and Vardaman and Dewey Dell are the only things in sight not of that single monotony of desolation leaning with that terrific quality a little from right to left, as though we had reached the place where the motion of the wasted world accelerates just before the final precipice. Yet they appear dwarfed. It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. I..
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William Faulkner |
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a39e9e7
|
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...
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William Faulkner |
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1fb322d
|
Your outside is just what you live in, sleep in, and has little connection with who you are and even less with what you do.
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William Faulkner |
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c51d496
|
As they walked through the bright noon, up the sandy road with the dispersing congregation talking easily again group to group, she continued to weep, unmindful of the talk. "He sho a preacher, mon!! He didn't look like much at first, but hush!" "He seed de power en de glory." "Yes, suh. He seed hit. Face to face he seed hit." Dilsey made no sound, her face did not quiver as the tears took their sunken and devious courses, walking with ..
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William Faulkner |