Quotes from Intruder in the Dust

“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“The American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife his child nor his country nor even his bank-account first (in fact he doesn't really love that bank-account nearly as much as foreigners like to think because he will spend almost any or all of it for almost anything provided it is valueless enough) but his motor-car. Because the automobile has become our national sex symbol. We cannot really enjoy anything unless we can go up an alley for it. Yet our whole background and raising and training forbids the sub rosa and surreptitious. So we have to divorce our wife today in order to remove from our mistress the odium of mistress in order to divorce our wife tomorrow in order to remove from our mistress and so on. As a result of which the American woman has become cold and and undersexed; she has projected her libido on to the automobile not only because its glitter and gadgets and mobility pander to her vanity and incapacity (because of the dress decreed upon her by the national retailers association) to walk but because it will not maul her and tousle her, get her all sweaty and disarranged. So in order to capture and master anything at all of her anymore the American man has got to make that car his own. Which is why let him live in a rented rathole though he must he will not only own one but renew it each year in pristine virginity, lending it to no one, letting no other hand ever know the last secret forever chaste forever wanton intimacy of its pedals and levers, having nowhere to go in it himself and even if he did he would not go where scratch or blemish might deface it, spending all Sunday morning washing and polishing and waxing it because in doing that he is caressing the body of the woman who has long since now denied him her bed.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“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.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“What sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury he can efface by destroying the victim and the witness but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“thinking remembering how his uncle had said that all man had was time, all that stood between him and the death he feared and abhorred was time yet he spent half of it inventing ways of getting the other half past:”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday wont be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed even a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“If you got something outside the common run that’s got to be done and cant wait, dont waste your time on the menfolks; they works on what your uncle calls the rules and the cases. Get the womens and the children at it; they works on the circumstances.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“IT WAS JUST NOON that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“people seemed to hold that the one sole end of the entire establishment of public office was to elect one man like Sheriff Hampton big enough or at least with sense and character enough to run the county and then fill the rest of the jobs with cousins and inlaws who had failed to make a living at everything else they ever tried.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“All right. What do you want me to do?’ ‘Go out there and look at him,’ Lucas said. ‘Go out where and look at who?’ he said. But he understood all right. It seemed to him that he had known all the time what it would be; he thought with a kind of relief So that’s all it is even while his automatic voice was screeching with outraged disbelief: ‘Me? Me?”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“My pistol is a fawty-one Colt,’ Lucas said. Which it would be; the only thing he hadn’t actually known was the calibre—that weapon workable and efficient and well cared for yet as archaic peculiar and unique as the gold toothpick, which had probably (without doubt) been old Carothers McCaslin’s pride a half century ago. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Then what?’ ‘He wasn’t shot with no fawty-one Colt.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“because thinking it into words even only to himself was like the struck match which doesn’t dispel the dark but only exposes its terror—one”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“You see?’ his uncle said. ‘He has nothing against what he calls niggers. If you ask him, he will probably tell you he likes them even better than some white folks he knows and he will believe it. They are probably constantly beating him out of a few cents here and there in his store and probably even picking up things—packages of chewing gum or bluing or a banana or a can of sardines or a pair of shoelaces or a bottle of hair-straightener—under their coats and aprons and he knows it; he probably even gives them things free of charge—the bones and spoiled meat out of his butcher’s icebox and spoiled candy and lard. All he requires is that they act like niggers. Which is exactly what Lucas is doing: blew his top and murdered a white man—which Mr Lilley is probably convinced all Negroes want to do—and now the white people will take him out and burn him, all regular and in order and themselves acting exactly as he is convinced Lucas would wish them to act: like white folks; both of them observing implicitly the rules: the nigger acting like a nigger and the white folks acting like white folks and no real hard feelings on either side (since Mr Lilley is not a Gowrie) once the fury is over; in fact Mr Lilley would probably be one of the first to contribute cash money toward Lucas’ funeral and the support of his widow and children if he had them. Which proves again how no man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“he would go to his uncle’s office where he would answer the telephone or run errands, all with some similitude of responsibility even if not actually of necessity; at least it was an intimation of his willingness to carry some of his own weight. He had begun it when he was a child, when he could scarcely remember, out of that blind and absolute attachment to his mother’s only brother which he had never tried to reason about, and he had done it ever since;”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“Then he came back through the Square late that Saturday afternoon (there had been a ball game on the High School field) and he heard that Lucas had killed Vinson Gowrie out at Fraser’s store;”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“You, young man,’ Lucas said. ‘Tell your uncle I wants to see him:’ then turned again and walked on after the sheriff, still a little stiffly in the smeared black suit, the hat arrogant and pale in the sunlight, the voice in the crowd saying: ‘Lawyer hell. He wont even need an undertaker when them Gowries get through with him tonight:”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“- A što se tiče Lucasa Bechaumpa, Samba, i on je homogen čovjek, izuzev onog njegovog dijela koji nastoji pribjeći čak ne onom što je najbolje u bijeloj rasi nego drugorazrednom - jeftinoj, traljavoj, nepoštenoj glazbi, prostom, lažnom, prcjenjivanom novcu bez pokrića, raskošnoj palači reklame podignutoj ni na čemu poput kuće od karata nad ponorom i svoj toj bučnoj zbrci političke aktivnosti što je nekoć bila naša nerazvijenija nacionalna industrija a sad je naša amaterska razbibriga - svoj lažnoj galami što je dižu ljudi koji je namjerno potiču i onda se obogaćuju na našoj nacionalnoj strasti prema osrednjosti: koji će čak i prihvatiti i ono što je prvorazredno pod uvjetom da je zagađeno i pokvareno prije nego što nam se servira: nama koji smo jedini ljudi na kugli zemaljskoj što se javno razmeću time da su drugorazredni, odnosno priprosti. Ne mislim pritom na takvog Samba. Mislim na onaj drugi njegov dio koji ima veću homogensot nego što je imamo mi i koju je dokazao ukorijenivši se u zemlju s koje je da bi mogao pustiti korijenje u nju morao doslovno istisnuti bijelca: jer je imao strpljenja i kad nije imao nade, dalek pogled i kad se na kraju nije ništa vidjelo i ne samo volju nego i želju da izdrži jer je volio onih nekoliko starih jednostavnih stvari koje mu nitko nije poželio oduzeti: ne automobil ni gizdavu odjeću ni svoju sliku u novinama nego samo malo glazbe (svoje vlasite), ognjište, ne svoje dijete nego bilo koje dijete, nekog boga, neko nebo koje čovjek može sebi malo priuštiti u svako doba a da ne mora čekati na smrt, malo zemlje da po njoj prospe vlastiti znoj među vlastitim zelenim ladicama i biljem. Mi - on i mi - morali bismo se udružiti: dati mu preostale privredne, političke i kulturne povlastice na koje ima pravo u zamjenu za njegovu sposobnost da čeka, izdrži i preživi. Onda bismo pobijedili; zajedno bismo vodili glavnu riječ u Sjedinjenim Državama; predstavljali bismo frontu koja bi bila ne samo neosvojiva nego koju ne bi mogla ugroziti čak ni masa ljudi koji više uopće i nemaju ništa zajedničko osim bjesomučne pohlepe za novcem i osnovnog straha od jednog nacionalnog neuspjeha koji kriju jedan od drugog iza glasnog iskazivanja počasti nekoj zastavi.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

“- Amerikanac zapravo ne voli ništa drugo osim svog automobila: ni ženu ni dijete ni domovinu čak mu ni bankovni račun nije na prvom mjestu (u stvari on uopće ne voli taj bankovni račun ni izdaleka toliko koliko to misle stranci jer on će potrošiti gotovo sav svoj novac ili baš sav za tako reći bilo što samo ako je dovoljno bezvrijedno) nego njegovo motorno vozilo. Jer automobil je postao naš nacionalni simbol seksa. Mi ne možemo pravo uživati ni u čemu ako se ne moramo bar jednu uličicu voziti do toga. A s druge strane cijela naša sredina i odgoj i obrazovanje zabranjuju nam sve što je kradomično i potajno. Zato se mi danas moramo rastaviti od supruge da bismo od ljubavnice otklonili i tako dalje. A kao rezultat toga američka je žena postala hladna i aseksualna; ona je projicirala svoj libido na automobil ne samo zato što njegov sjaj, njegove tehničke napravice i njegova pokreljivost udovoljavaju njezinoj taštini i nesposobnosti (zbog odjeće koju joj je nametnuo zemaljski savez trgovaca na malo) da hoda nego zato što je on neće izgnječiti ni raskuštrati niti je svu oznojiti i uznerediti. Zato da bi je uopće još nekako mogao osvojiti i potčiniti američki je muškarac morao usvojiti automobil. Makar zbog toga živio u iznajmljenoj štakorskoj rupi on ga mora on će ga ne samo imati nego i svake godine obnavljati da ponovno zadobije prvobitno djevičansto i nikom ga neće posuđivati, nijednoj tuđoj ruci neće dopustiti da ikad upozna posljednju vječito neoskvrnjenu i vječito požudnu intimnost njegovih pedala i poluga pa iako nema kamo ići s njim ili ako ima onda ne ide onamo gdje bi ga mogla nagrditi bilo kakva ogrebotina ili mrlja ipak svako nedjejno prijepodne provodi u njegovu pranju, mazanju i poliranju jer radeći to on miluje tijelo žene koja mu je već odavno uskratila pristup u svoj krevet.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Intruder in the Dust

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