William Faulkner Quotes

“Dewey Dell rises, heaving to her feet. She looks down at the face. It is like a casting of fading bronze upon the pillow, the hands alone still with any semblance of life: a curled, gnarled inertness; a spent yet alert quality from which weariness, exhaustion, travail had not yet departed, as though they doubted even yet the actuality of rest, guarding with horned and penurious alertness the cessation which they know cannot last.”

“I am not crying now. I am not anything.”

“I be durn if it didn’t give me the creeps.”

“The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

“My mother is a fish.”

“Sometimes I lose faith in human nature for a time; I am assailed by doubt.”

“The dead air shapes the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth.”

“I don’t know if a little music aint about the nicest thing a fellow can have.”

“One lick less. One lick less and we could be quiet.”

“I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it.”

“Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way.”

“Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old yours, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills do you can ride down.”

“At first I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would not go because there might be something I could do and I would have to haul her back.”

“I tried to do as she would wish it. The Lord will pardon me and excuse the conduct of them He sent me.”

“Now and then a fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it’s liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.”

“I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not.”

“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.”

“I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He love, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be firm if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.”

“Cash is wet to the skin. Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.”

“It wasn’t on a balance. I told them that if they wanted it to tote and ride on a balance, they would have to “

“Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. ”

“When she got to be thirty and was still single, we were ... vindicated.”

“Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.”

“With nothing left, she would ... cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. ”

“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town . . .”

“At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. ”

“After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.”

“Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying.”

“Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?”

“She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. ”

″...a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment...”

“The women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.”

“When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: “For rats.”″

“Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies’ magazines.”

“Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.”

“So [Miss Emily] vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.”

“Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.”

“She carried her head high enough—even when we believed that she was fallen. ”

“They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.”

“From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting.”

“You’re not the one who has to bear it . . . It’s not your responsibility. You can go away. You dont have to bear the brunt of it day in and day out. You owe nothing to them, to Mr. Compson’s memory. I know you have never had any tenderness for Jason. You’ve never tried to conceal it.”

“Caddy smelled like trees and like when she says we were asleep.”

“It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you--religion, pride, anything--it’s when you realise that you dont need any aid.”

“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.”

“I’m a lady. You might not believe that from my offspring, but I am.”

“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.”

“So that was it. And you were trying to tell Caddy and you couldn’t tell her. You wanted to, but you couldn’t, could you. Of course Caddy wont. Of course Caddy wont. Just wait till I dress.”

“If I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother.”

“So that was it. And you were trying to tell Caddy and you couldn’t tell her. You wanted to, but you couldn’t, could you. Of course Caddy wont. Of course Caddy wont. Just wait till I dress.”

“There was a clock, high up in the sun, and I thought about how, when you dont want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it, sort of unawares.”

“Huh, Dilsey said. Name aint going to help him. Hurt him, neither. Folks don’t have no luck, changing names. My name been Dilsey since fore I could remember and it be Dilsey when they’s long forgot me.”

“I know I’m just a trouble and a burden to you.”

“Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned.”

“His skin was dead looking and hairless; dropsical too, he moved with a shambling gait like a trained bear. His hair was pale and fine. It had been brushed smoothly down upon his brow like that of children in daguerrotypes. His eyes were clear, of the pale sweet blue of cornflowers, his thick mouth hung open, drooling a little.”

“He needs to be sent to Jackson . . . How can anybody live in a house like this.”

“They aint no luck going be on no place where one of they own chillen’s name aint never spoke.”

“It was not a girl’s room. It was not anybody’s room, and the faint scent of cheap cosmetics and the few feminine objects and the other evidences of crude and hopeless efforts to feminise it but added to its anonymity.”

“Father and I protect women from one another from themselves our women.”

“Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.”

“I couldn’t feel the gate at all, but I could smell the bright cold.”