William Faulkner

“The orchestra had ceased and were now climbing onto their chairs, with their instruments. The floral offerings flew; the coffin teetered. "Catch it!" a voice shouted. They sprang forward, but the coffin crashed heavily to the floor, coming open. The corpse tumbled slowly and sedately out and came to rest with its face in the center of a wreath. "Play something!" the proprietor bawled, waving his arms; "play! Play!”

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.[Light in August]”

“What matters is at the end of life, when you're about to pass into oblivion, that you've at least scratched 'Kilroy was here,' on the last wall of the universe.”

“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, going. "Wait," he said, talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: "Den lemme go wid you, honey." But she was going.”

“Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.”

“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 in sonorous tones death as though death were the boon, like all Protestant music.”

“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...”

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

“We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.”

“You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to.”

“קדי התרטבה לגמרי והתלכלכה בבוץ מאחור, ואני התחלתי לבכות והיא באה והתיישבה במים. 'די כבר.' היא אמרה. 'אני לא אברח.' אז השתתקתי. לקדי היה ריח של עצים בגשם.”

“היא החזיקה לי את היד ורצנו דרך העלים המרשרשים הבוהקים. עלינו בריצה במדרגות וברחנו מהקור הבוהק לתוך הקור החשוך.”

“הוא שם לי את הידיים בכיסים. שמעתי אותו מרשרש בעלים. הרחתי את הקור.”

“שדה הקרב מגלה לאדם את הייאוש ואת השיגעון, והניצחון הוא אשלייתם של פילוסופים ושל טיפשים.”

“האדם הוא סכום צרותיו.”

“"בין הכאב לבין האין אני בוחר בכאב.”

“מי שמסוגל לכך עושה, ומי שאיננו מסוגל וסובל בשל כך, כותב.”

“אומרים כי האדם מסוגל לסבול הכול; אפילו את מה שלא עשה, ואפילו את הרעיון כי אינו יכול לסבול עוד.”

“הוא האמין כי הוא מנסה להימלט מן הבדידות, ולא מעצמו.”

“החוכמה העליונה היא להיות בעלי חלומות כה גדולים, עד כי לא יאבדו את דרכם כאשר אנו מנסים להגשימם.”