The Unvanquished Quotes

“Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“...if there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it...”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“Victory without God is mockery and delusion, but...defeat with God is not defeat.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“Then I began to smell it again, like each time he returned, like the day back in the spring when I rode up on the drive standing in one of his stirrups - that odor in the his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can possibly be the worst which we can suffer.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything, given time, but to what it can accept, a limit in time, in the very time which nourishes the believing of the incredible.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“There are worse things than killing men, Bayard. There are worse things than being killed. Sometimes I think the finest thing that can happen to a man is to love something, a woman preferably, well, hard hard hard, then to die young because he believed what he could not help but believe and was what he could not (could not? would not) help but be.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“A dream is not a very safe thing to be near, Bayard. I know; I had one once. It’s like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it’s a good dream, it’s worth it. There are not many dreams in the world, but there are a lot of human lives. And one human life or two dozen——” “Are not worth anything?” “No. Not anything.—Listen.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“It was like a meeting between two iron knights of the old time, not for material gain but for principle—honor denied with honor, courage denied with courage—the deed done not for the end but for the sake of the doing, put to the ultimate test and proving nothing save the finality of death and the vanity of all endeavor.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“If somebody tole you, hit could be a lie. But if you dream hit, hit can't be a lie case ain't nobody there to tole hit to you”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“A]nd I realized then the unmitigable chasm between all life and all print–that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can’t, write about it.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“But I didn't need to see him because he was there, he would always be there; maybe what Druscilla meant by his dream was not something which he possessed but something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“and the intolerant eyes which in the last two years had acquired that transparent film which the eyes of carnivorous animals have and from behind which they look at a world which no ruminant ever sees, perhaps dares to see, which I have seen before on the eyes of men who have killed too much, who have killed so much that never again as long as they live will they ever be alone.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“He was wrong; he knew he was when it was too late for him to stop just as a drunkard reaches a point where it is too late for him to stop, where he promises himself that he will and maybe believes he will or can but it is too late.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“even though they had surrendered and said that they were whipped, were still soldiers. Maybe from the old habit of doing everything as one man; maybe when you have lived for four years in a world ordered completely by men’s doings, even when it is danger and fighting, you dont want to quit that world: maybe the danger and the fighting are the reasons, because men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“dream is not a very safe thing to be near,”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“so wiser than any man, else the men would not have gone on with the War for two years after they knew they were whipped.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“Do you know what I ain’t?” he said. “What?” I said. “I ain’t a nigger any more. I done been abolished.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“Do you think there’s enough Yankees in the whole world to whip the white folks?”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished

“Kiss me, Bayard."
"No. You are Father's wife."
"And eight years older than you are. And your fourth cousin too. And I have black hair. Kiss me, Bayard.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text

“Behind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map. Although Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable though massive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of the moment.”
― William Faulkner, The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text