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
It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the fear and anticipation of inevitable suffering, which ultimately turns out to be a less daunting reality.
In this quote, William Faulkner captures the essence of enduring anxiety over an inevitable event that one has long feared. When the moment arrives, despite the buildup of dread, the reality of the experience is often just a manifestation of pain, leading to a sense of relief once it is finally over. It conveys the idea that the fear we carry can often be more burdensome than the actual event itself, highlighting the paradox of human anticipation and experience.
Themes
FearPainAnticipationLifeInevitable
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges, one can use this quote to illustrate how fear can be more daunting than reality.
More from William Faulkner
All quotes →I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
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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...
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Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
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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 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.
William FaulknerRead
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
William FaulknerRead
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