All l 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 and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way.
WILLIAM FAULKNERTomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday’s omissions and regrets.
More William Faulkner Quotes
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Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts… That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth…
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain’t got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won’t fail to see a chance to meddle.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
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 a change.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Civilization begins with distillation
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
Read, read read. Read everything.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
WILLIAM FAULKNER -
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune
WILLIAM FAULKNER