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William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American novelist and short story writer whose works feature his native state of Mississippi. He was regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Quotes

 * The two Indians crossed the plantation toward the slave quarters. ... "Man was not made to sweat." "That's so. See what it has done to their flesh." "Yes. Black. It has a bitter taste, too." "You have eaten of it?" "Once." ... Doom began to acquire more slaves and to cultivate some of his land, as the white people did. But he never had enough for them to do. In utter idleness the majority of them led lives transplanted whole out of African jungles ... there was a hierarchy of cousins and uncles who ruled the clan and who finally gathered in squatting conclave over the Negro question, squatting profoundly ... "We cannot eat them," one said. "Why not?" "There are too many of them." "That's true," a third said. "Once we started, we should have to eat them all. And that much flesh diet is not good for man." ... "It means work," the third said. "Let the Negroes do it," the first said. ... "Yao. Let the Negroes do it. They appear to like sweating."
 * "Red Leaves," Saturday Evening Post (1930), also published in These 13 (1931) and Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950).
 * Setting: Chickasaw land; fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi. Author nationality: American. First published: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Curtis Publishing Company).

 * Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid. Ain't nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.
 * "The Bear” in The Saturday Evening Post (9 May 1942)

 * It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.
 * Letter to Malcolm Cowley (11 February 1949), quoted in William Faulkner : A Critical Essay (1970) by Martin Jarrett-Kerr, p. 46; also published in Selected Letters of William Faulkner (1978) by Joseph Blotner, p. 286

 * Mr. Khrushchev says that Communism, the police state, will bury the free ones. He is a smart gentleman, he knows that this is nonsense since freedom, man's dim concept of and belief in the human spirit is the cause of all his troubles in his own country. But if he means that Communism will bury capitalism, he is correct. That funeral will occur about ten minutes after the police bury gambling. Because simple man, the human race, will bury both of them. That will be when we have expended the last grain, dram, and iota of our natural resources. But man himself will not be in that grave. The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
 * Speech to the UNESCO Commission, as quoted in The New York Times (3 October 1959)

 * There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need'''.
 * As quoted in "Visit to Two-Finger Typist" by Elliot Chaze in LIFE magazine (14 July 1961)'''

 * Why that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.
 * On declining invitation to White House dinner honoring Nobel laureates, as quoted in Life magazine (20 January 1962)

 * Some folks wouldn't even speak when they passed me on the street. Then MGM came to town to film Intruder in the Dust, and that made some difference because I'd brought money into Oxford [Mississippi]. But it wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand thirty thousand dollars.
 * On the opinion of his neighbors of his writing profession, as quoted in "Faulkner Without Fanfare" in Esquire (July 1963), later published in Conversations with William Faulkner (1999) by M. Thomas Inge, p. 102

 * Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
 * As quoted in National Observer (3 February 1964)

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

 * Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.

 * Dilsey stroked Ben's head, slowly and steadily, smoothing the bang upon his brow. He wailed quietly, unhurriedly. "Hush," Dilsey said. "Hush, now. We be gone in a minute. Hush, now." He wailed quietly and steadily.

 * When the shadow of the sash appeared in the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said "I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excrutiatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. 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 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."

 * A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.

 * Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.

 * When people act like niggers, no matter who they are, the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger.
 * Jason to Caddy

 * 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.

 * Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

As I Lay Dying (1930)

 * He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

 * It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

 * Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

 * How often have Ι lain beneath rain on a strange roof thinking of home.

 * I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

 * My mother is a fish.

 * People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

 * Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.

 * Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

 * They pulled two seats together so Darl could sit by the window. One of them sat beside him, the other sat on the seat facing him, riding backward. One of them had to ride backward because state's money has a face to each backside and a backside to each face, and they are riding on the state's money which is incest. A nickel has a woman on one side and a buffalo on the other; two faces and no back. I don't know what that is. Darl had a little spy-glass he got in France at the war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs and no face. I know what that is.

 * Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying lightly in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.

"Mistral" (1931)

 * Short story found in Collected Stories (1950)

 * For the holy are susceptible too to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid... and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy.

Light in August (1932)

 * Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.
 * Chapter 2

 * Poor man. Poor mankind.
 * Chapter 4

 * Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
 * Chapter 4

 * ...ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.
 * Gail Hightower's thoughts in Chapter 20

"Beyond" (1933)
A short story first published in Harper's (September 1933) and later published in Collected Stories (1950). In a letter to Ben Wasson--published in Selected Letters of William Faulkner (1978) edited by Joseph Blotner--Faulkner stated of this story, in response to editorial demands for revision, that it could be explained in a footnote:

 * "The agnostic progresses far enough into heaven to find one whom his intelligence, if not his logic, could accept as Christ, and who even offers him an actual sight and meeting with his dead son in exchange for the surrender of his logic, agnosticism. But he naturally and humanly prefers the sorrow with which he has lived so long that it not only does not hurt anymore, but is perhaps even a pleasure, to the uncertainty of change, even when it means that he may gain his son again.  That is what I intended to tell and I hoped that I had, I thought I had chosen the best method, touching the whole thing pretty lightly by careful deliberation in understatement. It is a tour de force of esoteria [sic]. It can't be anything else. I have mulled over it for two days now, without yet seeing just how I can operate on it and insert a gland."

 * We never thought, sitting in my office on those afternoons, discussing Voltaire and Ingersoll, that we would ever be brought to this, did we?You, the atheist whom the mere sight of a church spire on the sky could enrage; and I who have never been able to divorce myself from reason enough even to accept your pleasant and labor-saving theory of nihilism.
 * Judge to Mothershed, a suicide

 * Is Robert Ingersoll telling me that for twenty years I have leaned upon a reed no stronger than myself?
 * The Judge

 * It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.
 * The Judge

 * You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because of it. I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of death, I know that I am. And that is all the immortality of which intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to have lost him.
 * The Judge to Robert G. Ingersoll

 * Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

 * ... but one mistake; that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgement and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realising that actually you cannot, that actually it is the stronger.

 * Happens is never once.

 * She accepted that—not reconciled: accepted-- as though there is a breathing-point in outrage where you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, Thank God that is all; at least I know it all.

 * You are my brother. No I'm not. I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry.
 * Dialogue between Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon (chapter 8)

 * "Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?" "I dont hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I dont hate it," he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
 * last lines (Chapter 9)

The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939)
The Wild Palms has ten unnumbered chapters. The odd chapters are titled "Wild Palms", the even ones "Old Man". If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem had been Faulkner's preferred title for the novel. Page numbers are from the Vintage Books (1966) edition.

 * ... the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I had never actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the sum of love is what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.
 * Harry Wilbourne to Charlotte Rittenmeyer, in (Ch. 3) "Wild Palms"; p. 48

 * ......not sin, he thought, I don't believe in sin. It's getting out of timing. You are born submerged in anonymous lockstep with the teeming anonymous myriads of your time and generation; you get out of step once, falter once, and you are trampled to death.
 * Harry Wilbourne, in (Ch. 3) "Wild Palms"; p. 54 (Faulkner's italics)

 * They say love dies between two people. That's wrong. It doesn't die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you are not good enough, worthy enough. It doesn't die; you're the one that dies.
 * Charlotte Rittenmeyer to Harry Wilbourne, in (Ch. 5) "Wild Palms"; p. 83

 * ...a mule will work for you ten years for the privilege of kicking you once.
 * (Ch. 6) "Old Man"; p. 160

 * I told you once how I believe it isn't love that dies, it's the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn't deserve the chance any more to love.
 * Charlotte Rittenmeyer to Harry Wilbourne, in (Ch. 7) "Wild Palms"; p. 218

 * ...when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.—Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief.  '''Harry Wilbourne, in (Ch. 9) "Wild Palms"; p. 324 (Faulkner's italics)

The Hamlet (1940)

 * Frenchman's Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation, the ruins of which—the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades—were still known as the Old Frenchman's place, although the original boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk's office in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them.

Go Down, Moses (1942)
A collection of seven linked stories. All page numbers from the first Vintage International hardcover edition (November 1990)

 * He was only ten. It seemed to him that he could see them, the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it. Because he recognised now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his own saliva, recognised fear as a boy, a youth recognises the existence of love and passion and experience which is his heritage but not yet his patrimony, from entering by chance the presence of perhaps even merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been loved by many men.
 * The Bear section 1 (p. 195)

 * He will need to be just a little bigger than smart, and a little braver than either.
 * The Bear section 2 (p. 203)

 * I am beginning to see the first sign of my increasing age: I dont like to know that my orders have been disobeyed, even when I knew when I gave them that they would be.
 * The Bear section 2 (p. 212)

 * He recognised its voice. It was the young hound which even a year ago had had no judgment and which, by the lights of the other hounds anyway, still had none. Maybe that’s what courage is, he thought.
 * The Bear section 3 (p. 229)

 * The doctor didn't even take out his stethoscope nor even touch him. “He’s all right,” the doctor said. “He didn’t even catch cold. He just quit.” “Quit?” McCaslin said. “Yes. Old people do that sometimes. Then they get a good night’s sleep or maybe it’s just a drink of whisky, and they change their minds.”
 * The Bear section 3 (p. 237)

 * ...in the commissary as it should have been, not the heart perhaps but certainly the solar-plexus of the repudiated and relinquished: the square, galleried, wooden building squatting like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in thrall ‘65 or no and placarded over with advertisements for snuff and cures for chills and salves and potions manufactured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and straighten the hair of negroes that they might resemble the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would have set them completely free.
 * The Bear section 4 (p. 244)

 * ...the ledgers in which McCaslin recorded the slow outward trickle of food and supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton made and ginned and sold (two threads frail as truth and impalpable as equators yet cable-strong to bind for life them who made the cotton to the land their sweat fell on),...
 * The Bear section 4 (p. 245, repeated with minimal change on p. 281)

 * So let me say it: That nevertheless and notwithstanding old Carothers did own it. Bought it, got it, no matter; kept it, held it, no matter; bequeathed it: else why do you stand here relinquishing and repudiating? Held it, kept it for fifty years until you could repudiate it, while He—this Arbiter, this Architect, this Umpire—condoned—or did He? Looked down and saw—or did He? Or at least did nothing: saw, and could not, or did not see; saw, and would not, or perhaps He would not see—perverse, impotent, or blind: which?
 * The Bear section 4 (p. 247)

 * “Dont you see?” he cried. “Dont you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse? Granted that my people brought the curse onto the land: maybe for that reason their descendants alone can—not resist it, not combat it—maybe just endure and outlast it until the curse is lifted. Then your peoples’ turn will come because we have forfeited ours. But not now. Not yet. Dont you see?”
 * The Bear section 4 (p. 266)

 * ...leaving as next by seniority Stuart that gallant man born apparently already horsed and sabred and already knowing all there was to know about war except the slogging and brutal stupidity of it...
 * The Bear section 4 (p. 274)
 * You said how on that instant when Ikkemotubbe realised that he could sell the land to Grandfather, it ceased forever to have been his.
 * The Bear section 4 (p. 286)

 * This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares.... No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.
 * Delta Autumn (p. 347)

Intruder in the Dust (1948)

 * It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
 * The opening sentence of the novel, Ch. 1

 * It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim.
 * Ch. 9; Faulkner is writing about time, with references to Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, and the discovery of America in 1492.

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1950)
[from Speech at the Nobel Prize Banquet after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature (10 December 1950)]

 * Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat....

 * He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

 * ...I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

 * I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Requiem for a Nun (1951)

 * The past is never dead. It's not even past.
 * Act 1, sc. 3; this has sometimes been paraphrased or misquoted as "The past isn't over. It isn't even past."

 * ... maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly all the time, is having to accept it.'''
 * Act 2, sc. 1

 * ... so vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.
 * Last paragraph, Act 3, The Jail (Nor even yet quite relinquish —)

The Town (1957)

 * The poets are wrong of course. ... But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
 * Gavin Stevens in Ch. 5

 * ...between what did happen and what ought to happened, I dont never have trouble picking ought.
 * V. K. Ratliff in Ch. 6

 * ...even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts, but ... even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing.... So now, as another poet sings, That Fancy passed me by And nothing will remain; which, praise the gods, is a damned lie since, praise, O gods! Nothing cannot remain anywhere since nothing is vacuum and vacuum is paradox and unbearable and we will have nothing of it even if we would, the damned-fool poet's Nothing.
 * Gavin Stevens in Ch. 8
 * The two lines quoted — not altogether accurately — are from A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896), XVIII: And now the fancy passes by And nothing will remain.

 * ...innocence is innocent not because it rejects but because it accepts; is innocent not because it is impervious and invulnerable to everything, but because it is capable of accepting anything and still remaining innocent; innocent because it foreknows all and therefore doesn't have to fear or be afraid.
 * Gavin Stevens in Ch. 15

 * "You don't know very much about women, do you?" she said. "Women aren't interested in poets' dreams. They are interested in facts. It doesn't even matter whether the facts are true or not, as long as they match the other facts without leaving a rough seam."
 * Eula Varner Snopes to Gavin Stevens in Ch. 15

 * ...women aren't interested in the romance of dreams; they are interested in the reality of facts, they don't care what facts, let alone whether they are true or not if they just dovetail with all the other facts without leaving a saw-tooth edge.
 * Gavin Stevens paraphrasing Eula Varner Snopes in Ch. 15

 * ...women are not interested in truth or romance but only in facts whether they are true or not, just so they fit all the other facts.
 * Gavin Stevens in Ch. 17; also in this chapter Gavin Stevens reflects — twice — that men are "interested in facts too".

 * She wanted to tell me. Maybe she even tried. But she couldn't. It wasn't because I was only twelve. It was because I was her child, created by her and Father because they wanted to be in bed together and nothing else would do, nobody else would do. You see? ... Because to the child, he was not created by his mother's and his father's passion or capacity for it. He couldn't have been because he was there first, he came first, before the passion; he created the passion, not only it but the man and the woman who served it; his father is not his father but his son-in-law, his mother not his mother but his daughter-in-law if he is a girl. ... and if a boy or a girl really is his father's and her mother's father-in-law or mother-in-law, which would make the girl her brother's mother no matter how much younger she was, then a girl with just one brother and him a twin at that, would maybe be his wife and mother too.
 * Charles Mallinson in Ch. 19; Charles Mallinson's mother, Maggie, and his uncle, Gavin Stevens, besides being their parents' only children, are twins.

 * ...girls, women, are not interested in romance but only facts.
 * Gavin Stevens to Eula Varner Snopes in Ch. 20

 * Maybe I was completely wrong that morning when I said how women are only interested in facts because maybe men are just interested in facts too and the only difference is, women dont care whether they are facts or not just so they fit, and men dont care whether they fit or not just so they are facts.
 * Eula Varner Snopes to Gavin Stevens in Ch. 20

 * Because as a rule women dont really care about facts just so they fit; it's just men that dont give a damn whether they fit or not.
 * Gavin Stevens to V. K. Ratliff in Ch. 24

Paris Review interview (1958)

 * The Paris Review interview (1956) with Jean Stein; later published in Writers at Work : The Paris Review Interviews (1958), First Series, edited by Malcolm Cowley

 * If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.

 * All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
 * On himself and his contemporaries.

 * I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry ﬁrst, ﬁnds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

 * Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

 * The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can't get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

 * Art is not concerned with environment either; it doesn't care where it is ... the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.

 * My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.

 * If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

 * Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

 * No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that 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 a man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral codes and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.'''

 * There were many things I could do for two or three days and earn enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp. I don't want money badly enough to work for it. In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

 * The two great men in my time were Mann and Joyce. You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

 * Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.

 * The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

 * Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move — which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

 * 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. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

 * People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do — after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.

 * If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. Maybe the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.
 * A statement regarding the Emmett Till murder.

 * Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse.

The Mansion (1959)

 * Or maybe married men dont even need reasons, being as they already got wives. Or maybe it's women that dont need reasons, for the simple reason that they never heard of a reason and wouldn't recognise it face to face, since they dont function from reasons but from necessities that couldn't nobody help nohow and that dont nobody but a fool man want to help in the second place, because he dont know no better; it aint women, it's men that takes ignorance seriously, getting into a skeer [scare] over something for no more reason than that they dont happen to know what it is.
 * V. K. Ratliff in Ch. 6

 * Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity.
 * Gavin Stevens in Ch. 6

 * At least wasn't nobody, no outsider, there to hear it so maybe even before next January he was able to believe hadn't none of it even been said, like miracle: what aint believed aint seen. Miracle, pure miracle anyhow, how little a man needs to outlast jest [just] about anything.
 * V. K. Ratliff about Gavin Stevens in Ch. 6

 * ...life is not so much motion as an inventless repetition of motion.
 * Charles Mallinson in Ch. 8

 * Then me too in Paris for the last two weeks, to see if the Paris of Hemingway and the Paris of Scott Fitzgerald (they were not the same ones; they merely used the same room) had vanished completely or not too.
 * Charles Mallinson in Ch. 9. The date is summer 1938.

 * Because women are marvellous. They stroll perfectly bland and serene through a fact that the men have been bloodying their heads against for years; whereupon you find that the fact not only wasn't important, it wasn't really there.
 * Charles Mallinson in Ch. 9

 * Save us, Christ, the poor sons of bitches.
 * J. C. Goodyhay in Ch. 12; George Garrett, in his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion (New York, 1994, p. xii), notes that in the final pages of The Mansion "both Stevens and Ratliff unknowingly echo the prayer of the preacher Goodyhay", which Garrett sees as expressing "Faulkner's inclusive, democratic vision of the equality of human souls".

 * ...Stevens himself hating horses even more than dogs, rating the horse an unassailable first in loathing since though both were parasites, the dog at least had the grace to be a sycophant too; it at least fawned on you and so kept you healthily ashamed of the human race. But the real reason was, though neither the horse nor the dog ever forgot anything, the dog at least forgave you; and his, Stevens's, thought was that what the world needed was more forgiving.
 * Ch. 16

Faulkner in the University (1959)

 * No man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment.
 * An answer to a student's question as to why he writes in long sentences during his Writer-in-Residence time at the University of Virginia in 1957-1958. Faulkner in the University, p. 84

 * That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing — from reading."
 * Faulkner in the University, p. 117

 * You write a story to tell about people, man in his constant struggle with his own heart, with the hearts of others, or with his environment. It's man in the ageless, eternal struggles which we inherit and we go through as though they'd never happened before, shown for a moment in a dramatic instant of the furious motion of being alive, that's all any story is. You catch this fluidity which is human life and you focus a light on it and you stop it long enough for people to be able to see it."
 * Faulkner in the University, p. 239

The Reivers (1962)

 * When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it, which is not innocence but appetite; his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it, which is not ignorance but size. But Boon didn't know this. He must seduce me. And he had so little time: only from the time the train left until dark.

 * A gentleman can live through anything.

Quotes about William Faulkner

 * Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn.
 * Paula Gunn Allen The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986)

 * When people talk about American literature, they really mean Hemingway, Faulkner and Poe and when they do include women it's Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay. To decide to take that on and say, 'I will speak and will be heard'-that takes a lot of guts.
 * 1988 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

 * Faulkner in Dry September-or Light in August, or even in The Sound and the Fury-can really get at (as you put it, "to the bone") the truth of what the black-white relationship is in the South, and how what a dark force it is in the Southern personality. At the same time, Faulkner, as a man, as a citizen of Mississippi, is committed to what in Mississippi seems to be their past. It is one thing for Faulkner to deal with the Negro in his imagination, where he can control him; and quite another thing to deal with him in life, where he can't control him. In life, obviously the Negro, the uncontrollable Negro, simply is determined to overthrow everything in which Faulkner imagines himself to believe. It is one thing to demand justice in literature, and another thing to face the price that one has got to pay for it in life.
 * 1961 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

 * It is difficult for a young person today to know what to do. You cannot take advertising seriously; you cannot be truly involved with selling, or respect yourself, if the product you make is meant to become obsolete in a year or two. There is very little real, important work to do. And where there is no work, something goes, because we discover through working what we cannot discover any other way. As Faulkner says, you cannot make love eight hours a day, or drink or walk eight hours a day. You have to do something with your life, you have to find out what it is.
 * 1962 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

 * what's the difference between regional being the Southwest and regional being the South if the story is brilliant enough to be universal? Does it matter that Faulkner's universe was little? When he finished Absalom, Absalom, it wasn't about Mississippi; it was about the cosmos. So if a book like that is written by a Puerto Rican or a Native American, why should it continue to be taught as ethnic literature?
 * Judith Ortiz Cofer Interview in A Poet's Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets by Bruce Allen Dick (2000)

 * Faulkner falsified life for dramatic effect. It's sentimentality disguised by the corncob.
 * James Gould Cozzens, "Books: The Hermit of Lambertville", Time (2 September 1957)

 * As for William Faulkner, I guess I can't really pin down what his influence is. I think one absorbs him through the skin. He is just such a wonderful storyteller. He is so much of an American writer. I have read him over and over. I really like the other writers you mentioned as well. Everybody that you read is a literary influence. I had a literary education so the entire literary canon is a background. I'm very fond of John Donne.
 * 1986 interview in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (1994)

 * Apparently the entire population of Jefferson, Mississippi consists of rhetoricians who would blanch at the sight of a simple declarative sentence ... Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book except that it seems to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent.
 * Clifton Fadiman, in a review of Absalom, Absalom! in The New Yorker (1936); later published in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) edited R. P. Warren

 * Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one.
 * Ernest Hemingway, Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, ed. M.J. Bruccoli (1986)

 * Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)
 * Alice Hoffman Survival Lessons (2013)

 * I am the child of a bilingual family that delights in tongue acrobatics of mixed syntax and vocabulary. We write as we speak, in run-on sentences (if Faulkner could do it and be called great, why can't we?)
 * Aurora Levins Morales Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (2019 edition)

 * Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. It is good-and universal-because it is specifically about a particular world. That's what I wish to do.
 * 1981 interview in Conversations with Toni Morrison edited by Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie (1994)

 * I see the world very much in a Faulkner kind of way. People keep reappearing for me; all those women I knew in their thirties with small children when that first book came out in '59-I still know them now. There's still a lot of them around. And so I don't see life in what used to be called an alienated way. I see people going away and coming back. And I think a lot of people live that way; I don't think I'm so alone in that.
 * 1978 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)

 * The greatness of a writer has nothing to do with subject matter itself, only with how much the subject matter touches the author. It is the density of style which counts. Through Hemingway's style you feel matter, iron, wood. I admire Hemingway but I prefer what I know of Faulkner. Light in August is a marvelous book.
 * Boris Pasternak Interview (1960)

 * What so impressed me on that first reading was the self-containedness of Tolkien's world. I suppose there are a few novelists who have created worlds that are uniquely their own — Faulkner, for example, or Dickens. But since their world is fairly close to the actual world, it cannot really be called a unique creation. The only parallel that occurs to me is the Wagner Ring cycle, that one can only enter as if taking a holiday on a strange planet.
 * Colin Wilson in Tree By Tolkien, p. 8-9 (1974)

title: William Faulkner


text:
Ric Berger

Richard "Ric" Berger (1894 – 1984) was a Swiss professor of design, decoration, and art history and a devoted supporter of a common easily understood European language, Interlingua.

Sourced

 * Europa es dividite per le muros de 30 linguas. Felicemente, inter iste linguas national, circa 10.000 parolas de origine grec e latin son commun. Iste preciose tresor linguistic debe esser utilisate al maximo sin mutilar un sol parola o inventar alteres.
 * Translation: Europe is divided by the walls of 30 languages. Fortunately, among these national languages, around 10,000 words of Greek and Latin origin are common. This precious linguistic treasure ought to be used maximally without mutilating one single word or inventing others.
 * Revista de Interlingua, nº 48, 1970.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Ric Berger


text:
Matthew Henry

Matthew Henry (October 18, 1662 – June 22, 1714) was an Welsh non-conformist clergyman. He became minister of a Presbyterian congregation at Chester in 1687, removing in 1712 to Mare Street, Hackney. Two years later, he died suddenly of apoplexy at Nantwich while on a journey from Chester to London.

Henry's well-known Exposition of the Old and New Testaments (1708–1710) is a commentary of a practical and devotional rather than of a critical kind, covering the whole of the Old Testament, and the Gospels and Acts in the New Testament. Its simple piety and its practical application, combined with the well-sustained flow of its racy English style, made it one of the best works of its type.

Quotes

 * Were a man to live as long as Methuselah, and to spend all his days in the highest delights sin can offer, one hour of the anguish and tribulation that must follow, would far outweigh them.
 * A commentary upon the holy Bible: Job to Salomon's song (1835), p. 418.

 * Wise anger is like fire from a flint: there is great ado to get it out; and when it does come, it is out again immediately.
 * Reported in The Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. Matthew Henry (1830), p. 134.

Commentaries

 * The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.
 * Genesis 2:21.

 * Many a dangerous temptation comes to us in fine gay colours that are but skin-deep.
 * Genesis 3.

 * The better day, the worse deed.
 * Genesis 3.

 * So great was the extremity of his pain and anguish that he did not only sigh but roar.
 * Job 3.

 * To their own second thoughts.
 * Job 6.

 * He rolls it under his tongue as a sweet morsel.
 * Psalm 36.

 * Our creature comforts
 * Psalm 37.

 * None is so deaf as those that will not hear.
 * Psalm 58.

 * They that die by famine die by inches.
 * Psalm 59.

 * To fish in troubled waters.
 * Psalm 60.

 * Here is bread, which strengthens man's heart, and therefore called the staff of life.
 * Psalm 104.

 * Hearkners, we say, seldom hear good of themselves.
 * Ecclesiastes 7.

 * Those who will not be counselled, cannot be helped. More souls are ruined by pride than by any other sin whatever.
 * Isaiah 16:6-14

 * It was a common saying among the Puritans, "Brown bread and the Gospel is good fare."
 * Isaiah 30.

 * Blushing is the colour of virtue.
 * Jeremiah 3.

 * It is common for those that are farthest from God, to boast themselves most of their being near to the Church.
 * Jeremiah 7.

 * Blushing is the colour of virtue.
 * Jeremiah 20.

 * None so blind as those that will not see.
 * Jeremiah 20.

 * Those may justly be reckoned void of understanding that do not bless and praise God; nor do men ever rightly use their reason till they begin to be religious, nor live as men till they live to the glory of God. As reason is the substratum or subject of religion (so that creatures which have no reason are not capable of religion), so religion is the crown and glory of reason, and we have our reason in vain, and shall one day wish we had never had it, if we do not glorify God with it.
 * Daniel 4:34-37.

 * Not lost, but gone before.
 * Matthew 2.

 * Those that are above business.
 * Matthew 20.

 * Better late than never.
 * Matthew 21.

 * Saying and doing are two things.
 * Matthew 21.

 * Judas had given them the slip.
 * Matthew 22.

 * Whatever we have, the property of it is God's; we have only the use of it, according to the direction of our great Lord, and for his honour.
 * Luke 16.

 * After a storm comes a calm.
 * Acts 9.

 * Men of polite learning and a liberal education.
 * Acts 10.

 * It is good news, worthy of all acceptation; and yet not too good to be true.
 * Timothy 1.

 * It is not fit the public trusts should be lodged in the hands of any, till they are first proved and found fit for the business they are to be entrusted with.
 * Timothy 3.

 * Judas had given them the slip.
 * Luke 22.

 * Do nothing till thou hast well considered the end of it.
 * Proverbs 7.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

 * Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

 * Extraordinary afflictions are not always the punishment of extraordinary sins, but sometimes the trial of extraordinary graces.
 * P. 9.

 * The way to preserve the peace of the church is to preserve the purity of it.
 * P. 148.

 * An active faith can give thanks for a promise even though it be not yet performed, knowing that God's bonds are as good as ready money.
 * P. 241.

 * The sentences in the book of providence are sometimes long, and you must read a great way before you understand their meaning.
 * P. 280.

 * In all God's providences, it is good to compare His word and His works together; for we shall find a beautiful harmony between them, and that they mutually illustrate each other.
 * P. 281.

Misquoted

 * I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed.
 * First reported in Arnold Gingrich, Coronet, Volume 17 (1944), which characterizes the quote as a diary entry. A much earlier report in "Life of the Rev. Matthew Henry", in Christian Biography (1799), p. 66, has Henry writing: What reason have I to be thankful to God, that having travelled so much, yet I was never robbed before now. 2. What abundance of evil this love of money is the root of, that four men should venture their lives and souls for ubout half-a-crown a-piece. 3. See the power of Satan working in the children of disobedience. 4. The vanity of worldly wealth—how soon we may be stript of it, how loose we ought to sit to it.

title: Matthew Henry


text:
Richard Savage

Richard Savage (c. 1697 – August 1, 1743) was an English poet.

Quotes

 * Nay, but weigh well what you presume to swear! Oaths are of dreadful Weight—and, if they're false, Draw down Damnation.
 * Sir Thomas Overbury (1724), Act II, scene i.

 * When Anger rushes, unrestrain'd, to Action, Like a hot Steed, it stumbles in its way! The Man of Thought wounds deepest, and strikes safely.
 * Sir Thomas Overbury (1724), Act II, scene i.

 * He lives to build, not boast, a generous race; No tenth transmitter of a foolish face.
 * The Bastard (1728), line 7, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

 * May see thee now, though late, redeem thy name, And glorify what else is damn'd to fame.
 * Character of Foster, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "All crowd, who foremost shall be damn'd to fame", Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book III, line 158.

title: Richard Savage


text:
Bret Harte

Francis Bret Harte (August 25, 1839 – May 6, 1902) was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California.

Quotes

 * Well, no offense: Thar ain't no sense In gittin' riled.
 * Complete Poetical Works, III. IN DIALECT, Jim.

 * Howbeit, though no scholar, I am not one of those who misuse the English speech, and, being foolishly led by the hasty custom of scriveners and printers to write the letters "T" and "H" joined together, which resembleth a "Y," do incontinently jump to the conclusion the THE is pronounced "Ye,"--the like of which I never heard in all England.
 * Adventures of John Longbowe, Yeoman.

 * Later, when we were forced to accept the fact that finding gold was really the primary object of a gold-mining company, we still remained there
 * Captain Jim's Friend.

 * And then, for an old man like me, it's not exactly right, This kind o' playing soldier with no enemy in sight.
 * East and West Poems, Part I, The Old Major Explains.

 * And he says that the mountains are fairer For once being held in your thought;
 * East and West Poems, Part I, His Answer to "Her Letter.".

 * Don't be too quick To break bad habits: better stick, Like the Mission folk, to your arsenic.
 * East and West Poems, Part I, The Wonderful Spring of San Joaquin.

 * There is peace in the swamp, though the quiet is Death,
 * East and West Poems, Part I, The Copperhead.

 * But, when the goddess' work is done, The woman's still remains.
 * East and West Poems, Part I, The Goddess.

 * Each lost day has its patron saint!
 * East and West Poems, Part I, The Galeon.

 * Virtue always meets reward, But quicker when it wears a sword;
 * East and West Poems, Part II, The Legends of the Rhine.

The Heathen Chinee (1870)

 * The Heathen Chinee, originally published as Plain Language from Truthful James (1870), a satire on the racist attitudes of the old West.

 * Which I wish to remark,— And my language is plain,— That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

 * Ah Sin was his name.

 * With the smile that was childlike and bland.

 * We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor.
 * If I looked as good as Justin Chamo Spear I would look in the mirror too

title: Bret Harte


text:
User:Torrente~enwikiquote

Erik Enfors Vallåkergat.25 SE-432 37 VARBERG Svedia Tel: +46 (0)340-875 45 e-post: erik.enfors@telia.com

title: User:Torrente~enwikiquote


text:
Francis Quarles

Francis Quarles (baptised May 8, 1592, died September 8, 1644) was a prolific English prose-writer and poet. He is now best known for his Emblems (1638) and other moral and devotional verse.

Quotes

 * No man is born unto himself alone; Who lives unto himself, he lives to none.
 * Esther (1621), Sec. 1, Meditation 1.

 * The way to bliss lies not on beds of down, And he that has no cross deserves no crown.
 * Esther (1621), Sec. 9, Meditation 9.

 * Shine Son of glory, and my sinnes are gone Like twinkling Starres before the rising Sunne.
 * The Authour's Dreame (1629).

 * Even such is man, whose glory lends His life a blaze or two, and ends.
 * Hos ego versiculos (1629).

 * Reason can discover Things only near; sees nothing that's above her.
 * Divine Fancies (1632), Book 3, § 54: "On Faith and Reason".

 * He that loves thee, He that keeps And guards thee, never slumbers, never sleeps.
 * Divine Fancies (1632), Book 4, § 2: "A Goodnight".

 * My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on; Judge not the play before the play is done: Her plot hath many changes; every day Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.
 * Epigram. Respice Finem (1635).

 * Thou art my life, my way, my light
 * Why dost thou Shade thy Lovely Face? (1635).

 * And what's a life? A weary pilgrimage, Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.
 * What Is Life.

 * Let all thy joys be as the month of May And all thy days be as a marriage day: Let sorrow, sickness, and a troubled mind Be stranger to thee.
 * To a Bride.

 * The world's an Inn; and I her guest.
 * On the World.

 * Death aims with fouler spite At fairer marks.
 * Divine Poems (ed. 1669). Compare: "Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow", Edward Young, Night Thoughts, night v. line 1011.

 * In having all things, and not Thee, what have I? Not having Thee, what have my labors got? Let me enjoy but Thee, what farther crave I? And having Thee alone, what have I not?
 * Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 609.

Emblems (1635)

 * This house is to be let for life or years; Her rent is sorrow, and her income tears. Cupid, 't has long stood void; her bills make known, She must be dearly let, or let alone.
 * Book I, no. 10, Epigram 10.

 * Sweet Phosphor, bring the day Whose conquering ray May chase these fogs; Sweet Phosphor, bring the day!  Sweet Phosphor, bring the day! Light will repay The wrongs of night; Sweet Phosphor, bring the day!
 * Book I, no. 14.

 * We spend our midday sweat, our midnight oil; We tire the night in thought, the day in toil.
 * Book II, no. 2.

 * Be wisely worldly, be not worldly wise.
 * Book II, no. 2.

 * This house is to be let for life or years; Her rent is sorrow, and her income tears. Cupid, 't has long stood void; her bills make known, She must be dearly let, or let alone.
 * Book II, no. 10, Epigram.

 * The slender debt to Nature's quickly paid, Discharged, perchance, with greater ease than made.
 * Book II, no. 13. Compare: "To die is a debt we must all of us discharge", Euripides, Alcestis, line 418.

 * The road to resolution lies by doubt: The next way home's the farthest way about.
 * Book IV, no. 2, Epigram.

 * The next way home's the farthest way about.
 * Book IV, no. 2, Epigram 2. Compare: "The longest way round is the shortest way home", Bohn, Foreign Proverbs (Italian).

 * It is the lot of man but once to die.
 * Book V, no. 7.

Enchiridion (1640)

 * Let the fear of a danger be a spur to prevent it: He that fears otherwise, gives advantage to the danger.

 * Anger, when it is long in coming, is the stronger when it comes, and the longer kept.

 * Let the greatest part of the news thou hearest be the least part of what thou believest, lest the greater part of what thou believest be the least part of what is true. Where lies are easily admitted the father of lies will not easily be excluded.

title: Francis Quarles


text:
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1 April 1647 – 26 July 1680) was an English nobleman, a friend of King Charles II of England, and the writer of much satirical and bawdy poetry.

Quotes
Whose word no man relies on; He never says a foolish thing, Nor ever does a wise one.'''
 * '''Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
 * Written on the Bedchamber Door of Charles II, as quoted in The Book of Days : A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities (1832) by Robert Chambers, Vol. II, "July 26", p. 126

 * Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.
 * As quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958) by Herbert Victor Prochnow

A Letter from Artemisia in Town to Chloe in the Country (1679)

 * As published in The Works of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1800) by Samuel Johnson, p. 9

The softest refuge innocence can find
 * Love, the most generous passion of the mind

From pedagogue and mother just fit free, The heir and hopes of a great famiiy; Who with strong beer and beef the country rules, And ever since the Conquest have been fools; And now, with careful prospect to maintain This character, lest crossing of the strain Should mend the booby breed, his friends provide A cousin of his own to be his bride...
 * When my young master's worship comes to town,

A Satire Against Mankind (1679)
One of those strange, prodigious Creatures Man, A Spirit free, to choose for my own Share, What sort of Flesh and Blood I pleas'd to wear, I'd be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear, Or any thing, but that vain Animal, Who is so proud of being Rational.
 * Were I, who to my Cost already am
 * ll. 1-7

Which leaves the light of Nature, Sense, behind.
 * Reason, an Ignis fatuus of the Mind,
 * ll. 12-13

Mountains of Whimsies, heapt in his own Brain, Stumbling from Thought to Thought, falls headlong down Into Doubt's boundless Sea, where like to drown, Books bear him up a-while, and make him try To swim with Bladders of Philosophy.
 * Whilst the misguided Follower climbs with Pain,
 * ll. 16–21

Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a Search so painful, and so long, That all his Life he has been in the wrong.
 * Then Old Age, and Experience, hand in hand,
 * ll. 25-29

First they're enjoy'd, and then kickt out of Doors.
 * For Wits are treated just like Common Whores;
 * ll. 38-39

And Honesty's against all common Sense.
 * For all Men would be Cowards if they durst:
 * ll. 158-159

The Difference lies, as far as I can see, Not in the thing it self, but the Degree.
 * Most Men are Cowards, all Men should be Knaves.
 * ll. 169-171

Who, Preaching Peace, does practice Continence; Whose pious life's a proof he does believe, Mysterious Truths, which no Man can conceive. If upon Earth there dwell such God-like Men, I'll here Recant my Paradox to them; Adore those Shrines of Virtue, homage pay, And, with the rabble world, their Laws obey. If such there are, yet grant me This at least, Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast.
 * But a meek humble Man of modest Sense,
 * ll. 212-221

Other

 * If you have a grateful heart (which is a miracle amongst you statesmen), show it by directing the bearer to the best wine in town, and pray let not this highest point of sacred friendship be performed slightly, but go about it with all due deliberation and care, as holy priests to sacrifice, or as discreet thieves to the wary performance of burglary and shop-lifting. Let your well-discerning palate (the best judge about you) travel from cellar to cellar and then from piece to piece till it has lighted on wine fit for its noble choice and my approbation.
 * Letter to the diplomat Henry Savile (1673-1674)

Whose lord, oppressed with pride and poverty, (That to the few great bounty he may show) Is fain to starve the numerous train below.
 * The world appears like a great family,
 * Like a Great Family

 * Dead we become the lumber of the world.
 * After Death

To lend, or to spend, or to give in; But to beg or to borrow, or to get a man's own, It is the very worst world that ever was known.
 * It is a good world to live in,
 * Epigram, sometimes attributed to John Bromfield

And must conclude my judgment good, or none: For could my sense be naught, how should I know Whether another man's were good or no?''' Thus I resolve of my own poetry, That 'tis the best; and there's a fame for me. If then I'm happy, what does it advance, Whether to merit due, or arrogance? Oh, but the world will take offence hereby! Why then the world shall suffer for 't, not I. Did eer this saucy world and I agree, To let it have its beastly will on me? Why should my prostituted sense be drawn To every rule their musty customs spawn? But men may censure you; 'tis two to one, Whene'er they censure, they'll be in the wrong. '''There's not a thing on Earth, that I can name, So foolish, and so false, as common fame.''' It calls the courtier knave, the plain man rude, Haughty the grave, and the delightful lewd, Impertinent the brisk, morose the sad, Mean the familiar, the reserv'd-one mad. Poor helpless woman is not favour'd more, She's a sly hypocrite, or public whore. Then who the Devil would give this — to be free From th' innocent reproach of infamy These things consider'd, make me (in despite Of idle rumour) keep at home and write.
 * '''Born to myself, I like myself alone,
 * Did e'er this Saucy World

 * A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
 * On the King

The best good man with the worst-natured muse.
 * For pointed satire I would Buckhurst choose,
 * An allusion to Horace, Satire x. Book i; compare: "Thou best-humour'd man with the worst-humour'd muse!", Oliver Goldsmith, Retaliation, Postscript

She 's my delight, all mankind's wonder; But my jealous heart would break Should we live one day asunder.
 * Angels listen when she speaks:
 * Song

False Hearts, and broken Vows; If I, by Miracle, can be This live-long Minute true to thee, 'Tis all that Heav'n allows.
 * Then talk not of Inconstancy,
 * Love and Life, ll. 11-15

And I'm by Pox and Wine's unlucky chance Driv'n from the pleasing Billows of debauch On the dull Shore of lazy Temperance; My Pains at least some Respite shall afford While I behold the Battles you maintain When Fleets of Glasses sail about the Board, From whose Broad-sides Volleys of Wit shall rain.
 * So, when my Days of Impotence approach,
 * The Maim'd Debauchee, ll. 13–20

And, safe from Danger, valiantly advise; Sheltered in Impotence, urge you to Blows, And, being good for nothing else, be Wise.
 * Thus, Statesman-like, I'll saucily impose,
 * The Maim'd Debauchee, ll. 41–44

To every grain affords a birth: On her no showers unwelcome fall, Her willing womb retains 'em all, And shall my Caelia be confined? No, live up to thy mighty mind, And be the mistress of Mankind!
 * See the kind seed-receiving earth
 * Upon Leaving His Mistress, ll. 15-21

I fall on some base heart unblest, Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven, And lose my everlasting rest.
 * Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
 * Absent from thee, I languish still, ll. 13-16

Which like barren furrows lie, Brooding kisses I will pour, Shall thy youthful heart restore. (Such kind showers in autumn fall, And a second spring recall); Nor from thee will ever part, Ancient Person of my Heart.
 * On thy wither'd lips and dry,
 * A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover, ll. 7-14

Henceforth every night to sit With my lewd, well-natured friend, Drinking to engender wit.
 * Farewell, woman! I intend
 * Love a woman! Y’are an ass, ll. 9–12

I filled with love, and she all over charms; Both equally inspired with eager fire, Melting through kindness, flaming in desire. With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace.
 * Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
 * The Imperfect Enjoyment (published 1680)

False to my passion, fatal to my fame, Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
 * Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
 * The Imperfect Enjoyment

When absent from her eyes, That feed my love, which is my soul: It languishes and dies.
 * But oh, how slowly minutes roll
 * The Mistress: A Song, ll. 5–8

Is the best can be said for a very good wife.
 * The clog of all pleasure, the luggage of life,
 * On a Wife

Enquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise, Didst thou not stand to point their dull Philosophies? Is, or is not, the Two great Ends of Fate, And, true or false, the Subject of Debate, That perfect, or destroy, the vast Designs of Fate.
 * Great Negative, how vainly would the Wise
 * Upon Nothing, ll. 28–33

Nor must that man, who would reclaim a Lion, Take him by the teeth.
 * The Elephant is never won with Anger,
 * Valentinian (1685), Act I, Scene III
 * Valentinian was Rochester's adaptation of a play (ca. 1610-1614) by John Fletcher

Whose word no man relies on; He never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one.
 * We have a pretty witty king,
 * About King Charles II of England, as quoted in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Vol. XLIV (January - June 1857) p. 592; It is said to that this was written on the door of Charles II's bedchamber, and that on seeing it, the king replied, “This is very true: for my words are my own, and my actions are my ministers’...."

title: John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester


text:
Izaak Walton

Izaak Walton (9 August 1593 – 15 December 1683) was an English writer, author of The Compleat Angler.

Quotes

 * But God, who is able to prevail, wrestled with him, as the Angel did with Jacob, and marked him; marked him for his own; marked him with a blessing, a blessing of obedience to the motions of his blessed Spirit.
 * Life of Donne (1640)

 * For love is a flattering mischief, that hath denied aged and wise men a foresight of those evils that too often prove to be the children of that blind father; a passion, that carries us to commit errors with as much ease as whirlwinds move feathers, and begets in us an unwearied industry to the attainment of what we desire.
 * Life of Dr. Donne (1640)

 * The great secretary of Nature and all learning, Sir Francis Bacon.
 * Life of Herbert (1670)

 * God has two dwellings — one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart.
 * Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 579

The Compleat Angler (1653-1655)

 * I have laid aside business, and gone a-fishing.
 * Epistle to the Reader

 * Of which, if thou be a severe, sour-complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge.
 * Epistle to the Reader

 * Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learnt.
 * Epistle to the Reader

 * As no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.
 * Epistle to the Reader

 * I shall stay him no longer than to wish him a rainy evening to read this following discourse; and that if he be an honest angler, the east wind may never blow when he goes a-fishing.
 * Epistle to the Reader

 * As the Italians say, Good company in a journey makes the way to seem the shorter.
 * Part I, ch. 1

 * I am, sir, a Brother of the Angle.
 * Part I, ch. 1

 * It [angling] deserves commendations;… it is an art worthy the knowledge and practice of a wise man.
 * Part I, ch. 1

 * Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so: I mean, with inclinations to it, though both may be heightened by discourse and practice
 * Part I, ch. 1

 * Doubt not but angling will prove to be so pleasant that it will prove to be, like virtue, a reward to itself.
 * Part I, ch. 1. Compare: "Virtue is her own reward", John Dryden, Tyrannic Love, act iii, scene 1; "Virtue is to herself the best reward", Henry More, Cupid's Conflict; "Virtue is its own reward", Matthew Prior, Imitations of Horace, book iii. ode 2; John Gay, Epistle to Methuen; Home, Douglas, act iii, scene 1. "Virtue was sufficient of herself for happiness", Diogenes Laertius, Plato, xlii; "Ipsa quidem virtus sibimet pulcherrima merces" ("Virtue herself is her own fairest reward"), Silius Italicus (25?–99): Punica, lib. xiii. line 663

 * Sir Henry Wotton was a most dear lover and a frequent practiser of the Art of Angling; of which he would say, "'T was an employment for his idle time, which was then not idly spent, a rest to his mind, a cheerer of his spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness;" and "that it begat habits of peace and patience in those that professed and practised it."
 * Part I, ch. 1

 * Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element are made for wise men to contemplate, and for fools to pass by without consideration.
 * Part I, ch. 1

 * You will find angling to be like the virtue of humility, which has a calmness of spirit and a world of other blessings attending upon it.
 * Part I, ch. 1

 * I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, "That which is everybody's business is nobody's business."
 * Part I, ch. 2

 * Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.
 * Part I, ch. 2

 * An excellent angler, and now with God.
 * Part I, ch. 4

 * Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.
 * Part I, ch. 4

 * I love such mirth as does not make friends ashamed to look upon one another next morning.
 * Part I, ch. 5

 * No man can lose what he never had.
 * Part I, ch. 5

 * We may say of angling as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries: "Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did"; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.
 * Part I, ch. 5. Referring to William Butler, styled by Dr. Fuller in his "Worthies" (Suffolk) the "Æsculapius of our age." He died in 1621. This first appeared in the second edition of "The Angler," 1655. Roger Williams, in his "Key into the Language of America," 1643, p. 98, says: "One of the chiefest doctors of England was wont to say, that God could have made, but God never did make, a better berry".

 * Thus use your frog...Put your hook through his mouth, and out at his gills;...and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming-wire of your hook; or tie the frog's leg, above the upper joint, to the armed-wire; and in so doing use him as though you loved him.
 * Part I, ch. 8

 * This dish of meat is too good for any but anglers, or very honest men.
 * Part I, ch. 8

 * Look to your health; and if you have it, praise God, and value it next to a good conscience; for health is the second blessing that we mortals are capable of; a blessing that money cannot buy.
 * Part I, ch. 21

 * Let the blessing of St. Peter's Master be...upon all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in his Providence, and be quiet and go a-angling.
 * Part I, ch. 21

Quotes about Walton

 * Oh, the gallant fisher's life! It is the best of any; 'T is full of pleasure, void of strife, And 't is beloved by many.
 * John Chalkhill, The Angler; in 1683, the year in which he died, Walton prefixed a preface to a work edited by him: "Thealma and Clearchus, a Pastoral History, in smooth and easy verse; written long since by John Chalkhill Esq., an acquaintant and friend of Edmund Spenser." There is some speculation that Chalkhill was merely a pseudonym under which Walton wrote certain of his poems. See Thomas Zouch, Life of Walton (1830), p. 57: "Chalkhill,—a name unappropriated, a verbal phantom, a shadow of a shade. Chalkhill is no other than our old piscatory friend incognito".

title: Izaak Walton