When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William FaulknerRead
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.
Interpretation
True freedom cannot be hierarchical or conditional; it must be actively practiced.
In this quote, Faulkner emphasizes that genuine freedom is not based on social or hierarchical structures that dictate levels of equality, nor is it merely claimed without action. Instead, he advocates for the idea that freedom should be a practice that everyone engages in, suggesting that to truly be free, individuals must actively embody and enact their freedom in everyday life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech on civil rights to underline the essence of active participation in freedom.
When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
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 any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
The grandchildren should not bear the debts of the grandparents.
The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.
Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
War is not in itself a condition so much as the symptom of a condition, that of international anarchy. If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice, we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order
No man is such a conqueror, as the one that has defeated himself.
If our life has a meaning, an aim, it has nothing to do with our personal happiness, but something wiser and greater.
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