Memory believes before knowing remembers.

I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.

The fluid cradle of events (time).

Women are like that they don't acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively as you do bed-clothing in slumber fertilising the mind for it until the evil has served its purpose whether it ever existed or no.

There is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.

There are some things for which three words are three too many, and three thousand words that many words too less.

There is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that can't deny the bill when it comes around. They can't deny it, like the honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that's why don't anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good can't.

Women ... to them any wedding is better than no wedding and a big wedding with a villain preferable to a small one with a saint.

It is hard believing to think that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time.

That unpaced corridor which I called childhood, which was not living but rather some projection of the lightless womb itself.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.

It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

All the old accumulated rubbish-years which we call memory.

A fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk change.

Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.

You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratchers were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.

When you have plenty of good strong hating you don't need hope because the hating will be enough to nourish you.

Every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another man's wellbeing.

There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate has accepted but which digestion cannot compass -- occurrences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish; are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless; fixed, until we can die.

To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.

There are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that are and it don't matter a damn whether they are or not.

I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.

Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.

They were as two people become now and then, who seem to know one another so well or are so much alike that the power, the need, to communicate by speech atrophies from disuse and, comprehending without need of the medium of ear or intellect, they no longer understood one another's actual words.

The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.

WILLIAM FAULKNER, Intruder in the Dust

We were children, it is true, yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were, or should have been, beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear.

WILLIAM FAULKNER, Collected Stories

One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.

WILLIAM FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury

I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is; I've heard about it, but I never saw it.

WILLIAM FAULKNER, attributed, 20,000 Quips & Quotes

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.

WILLIAM FAULKNER, Intruder in the Dust

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.

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