William Faulkner

"We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid."

"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."

"Facts and truth really don’t have much to do with each other."

"You intend to kiss me and yet you are going to all this damn trouble about it."

"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 past is never dead. It's not even past."

"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move."

"The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies."

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

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

"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."

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."(on Ernest Hemingway"

"Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing."

"Amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame."

"I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi"

"No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope."

"He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land."

"Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and apparently inescapable----And so why should not their religion drive them to crucifixion of themselves and one another? he thinks."

"now i can get them teeth"