William Faulkner

“I reckon it does take a powerful trust in the Lord to guard a fellow, though sometimes I think that Cora’s a mite over-cautious, like she was trying to crowd the other folks away and get in closer than anybody else.”

“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.”

“My gad," one of them, warrant officer pilot, captain and M. C. in turn said to me once; "if you can treat a crate that way, why do you want to fly at all?”

“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 man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.”

“War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.”

“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good.”

“The razor hung between his shoulder-blades from a loop of cotton string round his neck inside his shirt. The same motion of the hand which brought the razor forward over his shoulder flipped the blade open and freed it from the cord, the blade opening on until the back edge of it lay across the knuckles of his fist, his thumb pressing the handle into his closing fingers, so that in the second before the half-drawn pistol exploded he actually struck at the white man's throat not with the blade but with a sweeping blow of his fist, following through in the same motion so that not even the first jet of blood touched his hand or arm.”

“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.”

“When it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get.”

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

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

“Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.”

“And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”

“It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.”

“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.”

“It is a happy faculty of the mind to slough that which conscience refuses to assimilate.”

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

“Yet the motion of the saw has not faltered, as though it and the arm functioned in a tranquil conviction that rain was an illusion of the mind.”

“It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”