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
And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Faulkner suggests that marriage is not a cure-all for a man's problems and that personal growth is essential.
In this quote, William Faulkner reflects on the notion that if a person requires marriage solely as a means of improvement or hope, it indicates a deeper failure in their personal character or life situation. The implication is that marriage should enhance one's life, but it cannot be a substitute for personal responsibility, growth, and resilience. Therefore, relying solely on marriage to fix one's issues suggests a profound lack of self-sufficiency and hope.
Themes
MarriageHopePersonal GrowthCharacterRelationships
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the value of personal development over romantic relationships.
More from William Faulkner
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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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