Quote

You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.

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
Much
Perfume
Things
Rotten
Men
Sweetness
Like
Nasty
Decay
Corruption
Flesh
Sleep
Orchids

More quotes by William Faulkner

Image
The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
William Faulkner
Image
As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
William Faulkner
Image
You men,' she says. 'You durn men.
William Faulkner
Image
...It seems hard that a man in his need could be so flouted by a road.
William Faulkner
Image
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
Image
I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
William Faulkner
Image
You can't. You just have to.
William Faulkner
Image
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
William Faulkner
Image
We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner
Image
A man never gets anywhere if facts and his ledgers don't square.
William Faulkner
Image
And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
William Faulkner
Image
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
William Faulkner
Image
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
William Faulkner
Image
She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.
William Faulkner
Image
People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
William Faulkner
Image
How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
William Faulkner
Image
Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.
William Faulkner
Image
The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...
William Faulkner
Image
It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.
William Faulkner
Image
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
William Faulkner