William Faulkner

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.

And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there's nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.

Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?

Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.

The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

Love doesn't die; the men and women do.