Quote

Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

William Faulkner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Life
Constant
Veil
Needed
Veils
Wise
Thrust
Gash
Wisdom
Perpetual
Rending
Living
Instant
Lightest
Enough
Naked
Docile
Even
Glad
Dared
Make
Brave
Hangs

More quotes by William Faulkner

Image
Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
William Faulkner
Image
It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.
William Faulkner
Image
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
William Faulkner
Image
I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie
William Faulkner
Image
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
William Faulkner
Image
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
William Faulkner
Image
The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
William Faulkner
Image
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
William Faulkner
Image
My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.
William Faulkner
Image
You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
William Faulkner
Image
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
Image
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.
William Faulkner
Image
The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.
William Faulkner
Image
No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
William Faulkner
Image
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.
William Faulkner
Image
Only when the clock stops does time come to life
William Faulkner
Image
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
William Faulkner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.
William Faulkner