Quote

Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.

William Faulkner

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William Faulkner
Age: 64 †
Born: 1897
Born: September 25
Died: 1962
Died: July 6
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New Albany
Mississippi
William Cuthbert Faulkner
William Falkner
William Cuthbert Falkner
Become
Prolonged
Might
Vocal
Nothing
Hopeless
Time
Instant
Injustice
Planets
Wailed
Sorrow
Conjunction
Sound
Conjunctions

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And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away
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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 back either. Just refuse to bear them.
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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.
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The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.
William Faulkner
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It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.
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I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
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A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
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That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today
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Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.
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Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
William Faulkner
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Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.
William Faulkner
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How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
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In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.
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She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
William Faulkner
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It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
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No man can write who is not first a humanitarian
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Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels only when the clock stops does time come to life.
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The past isn't over. It isn't even past.
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