Isabella Zenkl > Isabella's Quotes

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“...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, The Sound and the Fury

“The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.”
― William Faulkner

“Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”
― William Faulkner

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
― William C. Faulkner

“Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.”
― William Faulkner

“Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.”
― William Faulkner

“War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.”
― William Faulkner

“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, The Sound and the Fury

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.”
― William Faulkner

“...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
― william faulkner

“Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary”
― Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir

“Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall