William Faulkner Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. If happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can. Absalom, Absalom!

2. 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. Light in August

3. It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

4. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

5. She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it. The Town

6. The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

7. The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.

8. You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.

9. A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune The Sound and the Fury

10. And so I told myself to take that one. 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. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind. The Sound and the Fury

11. 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. The Sound and the Fury

12. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

13. Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain. The Wild Palms

14. He fled, not from his past, but to escape his future. It took him twelve years to learn you cannot escape either of them. The Hamlet

15. He fled, not from his past, but to escape his future. It took him twelve years to learn you cannot escape either of them....He had been a Kansas wheat-hand, he had herded sheep in New Mexico, he was again with a construction gang in Arizona and west Texas and then a longshoreman on the Galveston docks; if he were still fleeing, he did not know it because it had been years now since he had even remembered that he had forgotten the face. And when he proved that at least you cannot escape either past or future with nothing better than geography, he did not know that. (Geography: that paucity of invention, that fatuous faith in distance of man, who can invent no better means than geography for escaping; himself of all, to whom, so he believed he believed, geography had never been merely something to walk upon but was the very medium which the fetterless to- and fro-going required to breathe in.) The Hamlet

16. I dont suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.

17. I give it (grandfather's watch) 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. The Sound and the Fury

18. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm Absalom, Absalom!

19. The past is never dead. It's not even past. Requiem for a Nun

20. The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

21. Time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness. Light in August

22. You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

23. 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. Intruder in the Dust

24. You will tell me that you have just learned love; I will tell you that you have just learned hope. That's all; hope. The object does not matter, not to the hope, not even to you. Light in August