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
...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. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the futility of trying to conquer time and alludes to the illusion of victory.
William Faulkner's quote speaks to the nature of human existence and our relationship with time. It suggests that rather than striving endlessly to overcome life's challenges and the passage of time, one should occasionally embrace the transient moments of life. The idea that battles are not truly fought or won highlights the futility of our struggles, emphasizing that the search for victory may often be misguided, as it merely exposes our own shortcomings and sorrows. It suggests that forgetting time might bring a sense of peace amidst life's relentless march forward.
Themes
TimeHopeIllusionLifeStruggle
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of existence.
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.
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Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
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