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
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Memory shapes our beliefs before we consciously understand or remember things.
In this quote, Faulkner reflects on the complex nature of memory and belief. He suggests that our memories influence our beliefs long before we can articulate or recall them, implying that understanding and knowledge are built on the foundation of these deep-seated beliefs and memories that persist through time, often longer than our explicit recollections or the wonders that arise from them.
Themes
MemoryBeliefRecollectionUnderstandingKnowledge
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of personal identity during a community event.
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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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