Quotes by William Faulkner

“The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.”

“If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.”

“She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, bu...”

“You dont love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.”

“Who owned no property and never desired to since the earth was no man's but all men's, as light and air and weather were.”

“When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them and reached the top of the...”

“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid. ”

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”

“Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

“Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.”

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”

“But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, ...”

“You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.”

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”

“Yet even then the music has still a quality stern and implacable, deliberate and without passion so much as immolation, pleading, asking, for not love, not life, forbidding it to others, demanding ...”

“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.”

“ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.”