William Faulkner

The past isn't over. It isn't even past.

The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.

The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.

I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.

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?

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

Civilization begins with distillation

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

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

That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself

The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest