Collected Stories Quotes

“I can't do nothing. Just put it off. And that don't do no good. I reckon it belong to me. I reckon what I going to get ain't no more than mine.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them and reached the top of the mound just as the sun set. We had camping equiptment with us, but we made no fire. We didn't even make down our beds. We just sat side by side on that mound until it became light enough to find our way back to the road. We didn't talk. When we looked at each other in the gray dawn, our faces were gray, too, quiet, very grave. When we reached town again, we didn't talk either. We just parted and went home and went to bed. That's what we thought, felt, about the mound. We were children, it is true, yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were, or should have been, beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“... in an even wilder part of the river's jungle of cane and gum and pin oak, there is an Indian mound. Aboriginal, it rises profoundly and darkly enigmatic, the only elevation of any kind in the wild, flat jungle of river bottom. Even to some of us - children though we were, yet we were descended to literate, town-bred people - it possessed inferences of secret and violent blood, of savage and sudden destruction, as though the yells and hatchets we associated with Indians through the hidden and seceret dime novels which we passed among ourselves were but trivial and momentary manifestations of what dark power still dwelled or lurked there, sinister, a little sardonic, like a dark and nameless beast lightly and lazily slumbering with bloody jaws...”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“An old man is never at home save in his own garments: his own old thinking and beliefs; old hands and feet, elbow, knee, shoulder which he knows will fit.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“What modren ideas?” pap said. “I didn’t know there was but one idea about work—until it is done, it ain’t done, and when it is done, it is.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories of William Faulkner

“Girls are born weaned and boys don’t ever get weaned.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories of William Faulkner

“the long sleep that outlasts love,”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories of William Faulkner

“Folks don’t go to wars for fun. A man don’t leave his maw crying just for fun.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories of William Faulkner

“She turned now, facing him, as if she hand only been waiting until she became warm, the rich coat open upon the fragile glitter of her dress; there was a quality actually beautiful about her now-not of the face whose impeccable replica looks out from the covers of a thousand magazines each month, nor of the figure, the shape of deliberately epicene provocation into which the miles of celluloid film have constricted the female body of an entire race; but a quality completely female, in the old eternal fashion, primitive, assured and ruthless as she approched him ... . "She said at once, now. So we can go. You see? Do you understand? We can leave now. Give her the money, let her have it all. We won't care. ...”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“That’s our trouble. We done invented ourselves so many alphabets and rules and recipes that we can’t see anything else; if what we see can’t be fitted to an alphabet or a rule, we are lost. We have come to be like critters doctor folks might have created in laboratories, that have learned how to slip off their bones and guts and still live, still be kept alive indefinite and forever maybe even without even knowing the bones and the guts are gone. We have slipped our backbone; we have about decided a man don’t need a backbone any more; to have one is old-fashioned. But the groove where the backbone used to be is still there, and the backbone has been kept alive, too, and someday we’re going to slip back onto it. I don’t know just when nor just how much of a wrench it will take to teach us, but someday.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“We can invest trifles with a tragic profundity, which is the world.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“I guess maybe a talking man hasn't got the time to ever learn much about anything except words.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories

“Well, a man cant keep on going ashore anywhere, let alone Europe, all his life without getting ravaged now and then.”
“Good God,” Monckton said. “I should hope not.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories Of William Faulkner

“Anyway, there is a certain integral consistency which, whether it be right or wrong, a man must cherish because it alone will ever permit him to die.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories Of William Faulkner

“That's what throws a man off—that extra alternative. Just when he has come to realize that living consists in choosing wrongly between two alternatives, to have to choose among three.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories Of William Faulkner

“Needings,” she said. “It ain't Bory's needings and it ain't Her needings. It's dead folks' needings. Old Marse ]ohn's and Cunnel's and Mister]ohn's and Bayard's that's dead and can't do nothing about it. That's where the needings is. That's what I'm talking about.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories Of William Faulkner

“Ay, sir,” Alec said, who had long since found out that no man has courage but that any man may blunder blindly into valor as one stumbles into an open manhole in the street.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories Of William Faulkner

“Suicide iss just for the body,” the German said. “The body settles nothing. It iss of no importance. It iss just to be kept clean when possible.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories Of William Faulkner

“So you believe in the rightness of man?" I said.
"I will beat the heads off yez all for a shilling," Comyn said.
"I believe in the pitiableness of man," the subadar said. "That is better.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories Of William Faulkner

“I KNOW what they said. They said I didn’t run away from home but that I was tolled away by a crazy man who, if I hadn’t killed him first, would have killed me inside another week. But if they had said that the women, the good women in Jefferson had driven Uncle Willy out of town and I followed him and did what I did because I knew that Uncle Willy was on his last go-round and this time when they got him again it would be for good and forever, they would have been right. Because I wasn’t tolled away and Uncle Willy wasn’t crazy, not even after all they had done to him. I didn’t have to go; I didn’t have to go any more than Uncle Willy had to invite me instead of just taking it for granted that I wanted to come. I went because Uncle Willy was the finest man I ever knew, because even women couldn’t beat him, because in spite of them he wound up his life getting fun out of being alive and he died doing the thing that was the most fun of all because I was there to help him. And that’s something that most men and even most women too don’t get to do, not even the women that call meddling with other folks’ lives fun.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories Of William Faulkner

“That night they camped, in a grove of oaks and beeches where a spring ran. The nights were still cool and they had a fire against it, of a rail lifted from a nearby fence and cut into lengths—a small fire, neat, niggard almost, a shrewd fire; such fires were his father’s habit and custom always, even in freezing weather. Older, the boy might have remarked this and wondered why not a big one; why should not a man who had not only seen the waste and extravagance of war, but who had in his blood an inherent voracious prodigality with material not his own, have burned everything in sight?”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories of William Faulkner

“it was as if he had swung outward at the end of a grape vine, over a ravine, and at the top of the swing had been caught in a prolonged instant of mesmerized gravity, weightless in time.”
― William Faulkner, Collected Stories of William Faulkner