William Faulkner · 326 pages
Rating: (139.2K votes)
“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. 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.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“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...”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. 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.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“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.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“…I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“I am not one of those women who can stand things.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“I say money has no value; it's just the way you spend it.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“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.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue...”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than any other live or dead man”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“Did you ever have a sister? did you?”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That's why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it...”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury
“A Glass Eye leaped out from behind a parcked smail-trasport, blocked thier way. "Did you drop something?" Dodge asked the assassian. "Caus I think I see you..." he unheathed his sword and swung, decapitating the Glass Eye in one blow, "...head over there.”
― Frank Beddor, quote from Seeing Redd
“She CAN’T say it. To tell someone who cares about you that you’re being teased is really hard to do. I…couldn’t say it either. But after a while my mom found out and then…I would apologize to her like I was stupid. I would feel so pathetic. I would think that I was so pathetic for being teased. I was ashamed when my mom found out. I wondered…what would I do if she started to hate me? I was so scared. I was so scared I didn’t want anyone to know I was like that. I would desperately make up stories to try and hide it. And then I’d feel even more pathetic and ashamed so when mom told me, “It’s okay” I was so relieved. When she told me, “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” I was so relieved that I started crying again. Kisa-san might be feeling the same way. She didn’t want you to hate her. It’s because she loves you…that she couldn’t tell you.”
― Natsuki Takaya, quote from Fruits Basket: The Complete Collection
“I do not deny that he was eccentric; the mania he had for keeping that cat and teasing her until she flew at his face like a demon, was certainly eccentric. I never could understand why he kept the creature, nor what pleasure he found in shutting himself up in his room with this surly, vicious beast. I remember once, glancing up from the manuscript I was studying by the light of some tallow dips, and seeing Mr. Wilde squatting motionless on his high chair, his eyes fairly blazing with excitement, while the cat, which had risen from her place before the stove, came creeping across the floor right at him. Before I could move she flattened her belly to the ground, crouched, trembled, and sprang into his face. Howling and foaming they rolled over and over on the floor, scratching and clawing, until the cat screamed and fled under the cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned over on his back, his limbs contracting and curling up like the legs of a dying spider. He was eccentric.”
― Robert W. Chambers, quote from The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories
“My daughter has a mother. She is not and never will be yours. You stay the fuck away from her. And if I ever see you look at her again the way you were earlier, I'll fucking cut your eyes out with a dull spoon.”
― Nicole Jacquelyn, quote from Craving Constellations
“Life is one sick joke after another, I'm discovering. Because it hardly seems fair that it should hurt so much to finally get exactly what I've been wishing for.”
― Amy Engel, quote from The Book of Ivy
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