William Faulkner Quotes

Quotes about:

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  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.

  William Faulkner

  Truth, Honesty, Lying

  576 Copy quote

• The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

  William Faulkner

  Drama, Taken, Past

  398 Copy quote
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  You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

  William Faulkner

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  399 Copy quote

• Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

  William Faulkner

  Trying, Can Do

  248 Copy quote

• Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

  William Faulkner

  Life, Honesty, Now And Then

  268 Copy quote

• Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

  William Faulkner

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

  164 Copy quote

• Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.

  William Faulkner

  Inspirational, Running, Dream

  92 Copy quote

• Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.

  William Faulkner

  Long, Life Is, Process

  38 Copy quote

• Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Epic, Study

  259 Copy quote

• To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

  William Faulkner

  Reality, World, Firsts

  273 Copy quote

• Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error.

  William Faulkner

  Mistake, Errors, People

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

  27 Copy quote

• Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

  William Faulkner

  Thank You, Thanksgiving, Gratitude

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

  43 Copy quote

• All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

  William Faulkner

  Dream, Possible And Impossible, Perfection

  1956 On his generation of writers. Interview in Paris Review, Spring.

  16 Copy quote

• Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

  William Faulkner

  Reality, Facts

  129 Copy quote

• If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green... If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.

  William Faulkner

  Children, Blue, Color

  "William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12". Interview with Jean Stein, www.theparisreview.org. 1956.

  200 Copy quote

• You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

  William Faulkner

  Love, Faults, Virtue

  104 Copy quote

• Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

  William Faulkner

  Depression, Pain, Numbness

  242 Copy quote

• Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.

  William Faulkner

  Helping, Scared

  William Faulkner (2011). “Big Woods: The Hunting Stories”, p.26, Vintage

  82 Copy quote

• Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.

  William Faulkner

  Sweet, Memories, Past

  96 Copy quote

• We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

  William Faulkner

  Freedom, 4th Of July, Patriotic

  William Faulkner (2011). “Essays, Speeches & Public Letters”, p.151, Modern Library

  255 Copy quote

• The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience

  William Faulkner

  Imagination, Three, Source

  24 Copy quote

• If a story is in you, it has to come out.

  William Faulkner

  Stories, Ifs

  42 Copy quote

• So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

  William Faulkner

  Honesty, Lying, Men

  227 Copy quote

• To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.

  William Faulkner

  Life, Equality, Alaska

  William Faulkner (2011). “Essays, Speeches & Public Letters”, p.101, Modern Library

  164 Copy quote

• I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

  William Faulkner

  Life, Believe, Sacrifice

  121 Copy quote

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