Quotes

The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

I decline to accept the end of man.

Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

You cant understand it [the South]. You would have to be born there.

JEFFERSON, YOKNAPATAWPHA CO., Mississippi. Area, 2400 Square Miles. Population, Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313. WILLIAM FAULKNER, Sole Owner & Proprietor.

I dont hate it. . . . I dont hate it. . . . I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

Why do you hate the South?

They [the Negroes] will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion—not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.

Too much happens. . . . Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. . . . That’s what’s so terrible.

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.

My tongue swore, but my mind is not on oath.

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.

[ Of his loss of the sight of one eye, 1735 :] Now I will have less distraction.

Should I have left any stone unturned.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

[ Of Thomas More :] Omnium horarum hominem .

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own, quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.

The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

[ Of Abraham Lincoln :] His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement.

[ Responding to Rufus Choate’s characterization of the Declaration of Independence as “glittering and sounding generalities” :] “Glittering generalities!” They are blazing ubiquities.

As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.

In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. [Daniel] Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.

Government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.

The hand that rounded Peter’s dome,

The less government we have the better,—the fewer laws, and the less confided power.

On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid, and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to no real good, it brands no rime, it proposes no generous policy, it does not build, nor write, nor cherish the arts, nor foster religion, nor establish schools, nor encourage science, nor emancipate the slave, nor befriend the poor, or the Indian, or the immigrant.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; . . . that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.

For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

Never strike a king unless you are sure you shall kill him.

The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and not seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness out of the path of the divine circuits. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord’s power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.

A man may love a paradox without either losing his wit or his honesty.

A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

But do your thing, and I shall know you.

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history; only biography.

Almost all people descend to meet.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.