William Faulkner

Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

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 anymore than for pride or fear.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.

It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.

My gad," one of them, warrant officer pilot, captain and M. C. in turn said to me once; "if you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all?

All of us [writers] failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That__ why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won__, which is why this condition is healthy. Once he did it, once he matched the work to the image, the dream, nothing would remain but to cut his throat, jump off the other side of that pinnacle of perfection into suicide. I__ a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can__, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

I reckon if there__ ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man__ good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.

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

It's like it ain't so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.

Sex and death: the front door and the back door of the world.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

The American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife his child nor his country nor even his bank-account first (in fact he doesn't really love that bank-account nearly as much as foreigners like to think because he will spend almost any or all of it for almost anything provided it is valueless enough) but his motor-car. Because the automobile has become our national sex symbol. We cannot really enjoy anything unless we can go up an alley for it. Yet our whole background and raising and training forbids the sub rosa and surreptitious. So we have to divorce our wife today in order to remove from our mistress the odium of mistress in order to divorce our wife tomorrow in order to remove from our mistress and so on. As a result of which the American woman has become cold and and undersexed; she has projected her libido on to the automobile not only because its glitter and gadgets and mobility pander to her vanity and incapacity (because of the dress decreed upon her by the national retailers association) to walk but because it will not maul her and tousle her, get her all sweaty and disarranged. So in order to capture and master anything at all of her anymore the American man has got to make that car his own. Which is why let him live in a rented rathole though he must he will not only own one but renew it each year in pristine virginity, lending it to no one, letting no other hand ever know the last secret forever chaste forever wanton intimacy of its pedals and levers, having nowhere to go in it himself and even if he did he would not go where scratch or blemish might deface it, spending all Sunday morning washing and polishing and waxing it because in doing that he is caressing the body of the woman who has long since now denied him her bed.

he looked at her, stripped naked for the instant of verbiage and deceit.