William Faulkner Quotes

Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.

I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.

Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.

I have lately got back to that glorious society called Solitude.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things, they will not abandon you; and the nights are still here and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.

Death, lonely death, Beneath the withered leaves.

You'll never be alone in the bone orchard.

The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for only lasts a brief lifetime, and then there is eternity. Time forever. Millions of worlds are born, evolve, and pass away into nebulous, unmeasured skies; and there is still eternity. Time always. The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever.

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.

Winds and waters keepA hush more dead than any sleep.

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

I thought that it's so sad there are people who live their entire lives lonely. They die and no one goes to their funeral. I thought about how sad that was and how so many people out there have that path. I know this sounds weird, but if I could go take their bones back to my house and appreciate them for what they are, it would be my way of taking that loneliness away.

We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not anymore, a thing to mourn.

I've been able to carve out spaces for myself. At Sundance, I'm in the mountains - my property is private. I get on a horse and ride for three, four hours. Sometimes five. I get lost. But when I'm in, I'm in.

I want to be alone and work until the day my heads hits the drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's where I want to be.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

I don't think I've ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

Life is the desert, life the solitude, death joins us to the great majority.

Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

My favourite country is Finland because once you get to a certain point, you can drive for hours without seeing a single person. I love peace and quiet - something I don't get very often.

I feel calm when I'm on my own.

Of my friends I am the only one left.