The Memory

“It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

Fay Weldon

“Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.”
― Fay Weldon

Food Drink Sleep

“Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs.”
― Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman's Joke

Books

“Truly, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged!”
― Fay Weldon

Arrest Motion

“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.”
― William Faulkner

Human Heart

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”
― William Faulkner

Experience, Observation, Imagination

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
― William Faulkner

Afraid

“A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.”
― William Faulkner

Late August

“Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Ashamed

“Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest”
― William Faulkner

the writer's, duty is to write about these things.

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong 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.”
― William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949

Dreamers

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.”
― William Faulkner

Story

“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
― William Faulkner

Memory Believes

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

Time

“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.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Doorknob Off!

Today is the birthday of the man who said, “Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.” That’s the novelist William Faulkner (books by this author), born in New Albany, Mississippi (1897). He liked to get up early, eat a breakfast of eggs and broiled steak and lots of coffee, and then take his tobacco and pipe and go to his study. He took off the doorknob and carried it inside with him, where he wrote his novels by hand on large sheets of paper, and then typed them out with two fingers on an old Underwood portable. He was prolific this way — in a four-year span, he published some of his best novels: Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932). In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Love

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

The Sound and the Fury

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Always Dream

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”
― William Faulkner

The Past...

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
― William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun