Mosquitoes Quotes

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“Forget grief. Only an idiot has no grief, and only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“You tell 'em, big boy; treat 'em rough.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“Time? Time? Why worry about something that takes care of itself so well? You were born with the habit of consuming time. Be satisfied with that.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, being an artist is an excuse for a form of behavior.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“As you entered the room the thing drew your eyes: you turned sharply as to a sound, expecting movement. But it was marble, it could not move. And when you tore your eyes away and turned your back on it at last, you got again untarnished and high and clean that sense of swiftness, of space encompassed; but on looking again it was as before: motionless and passionately eternal — the virginal breastless torso of a girl, headless, armless, legless, in marble temporarily caught and hushed yet passionate still for escape, passionate and simple and eternal in the equivocal derisive darkness of the world. Nothing to trouble your youth or lack of it: rather something to trouble the very fibrous integrity of your being.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“The art of Life, of a beautiful and complete existence of the Soul”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“[A] generation ago ... the thing to do was to get married at twenty-one and go to work immediately, regardless of one's equipment or inclination or aptitude. But now they grow up into the convention that youth, that being under thirty years of age, is a protracted sophomore course without lectures, in which one must spend one's entire time dressed like a caricature, drinking homemade booze and pawing at the opposite sex in the intervals of being arrested by traffic policeman.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“The universal benefit of religion is that it gets the children out of the house on Sunday mornings.'

'But education gets them out of the house five days a week.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“I'd have to listen to somebody - artist or shoe clerk. And the artist is more entertaining because he knows less about what he is trying to do.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“[Poetry is] a kind of childlike faith in the efficacy of words, you see, a kind of belief that circumstance somehow will invest the veriest platitude with magic.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“The trouble with modern verse is, that to comprehend it you must have recently passed through an emotional experience identical with that through which the poet himself has recently passed. The poetry of modern poets is like a pair of shoes that only those whose feet are shaped like the cobbler's feet, can wear; while the old boys turned out shoes that anybody who can walk at all can wear.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“It ain't the man a woman cares for that reaps the harvest of passion, you know: it's the next man that comes along after she's lost the other one.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“It's like morphine, language is. A fearful habit to form: you become a bore to all who would otherwise cherish you. Of course, there is the chance that you may be hailed as a genius after you are dead long years, but what is that to you?”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes

“In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.”
― William Faulkner, Mosquitoes