William Faulkner Quotes

How much does a man live, after all?/ Does he live a thousand days, or one only? For a week, or for several centuries?/ How long does a man spend dying?/ What does it mean to say 'for ever'?

Only when the clock stops does time come to life

Time," the Captain said, "is not what you think." He sat down next to Eddie. "Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.

Time rushes by and yet time is frozen. Funny how we get so exact about time at the end of life and at its beginning. She died at 6:08 or 3:46, we say, or the baby was born at 4:02. But in between we slosh through huge swatches of time--weeks, months, years, decades even.

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

Every thing admonishes us how needlessly long life is.

I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.

The concept of time shuts off eternity.

We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance,--what ample borrowers of eternity they are!

What is the flesh and blood compounded ofBut a few moments in the life of time?This prowling of the cells, litigious love,Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.

Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.

Time, how short-eternity, how long! Death, how brief-immortali ty, how endless!

Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.

I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie

It isn't true that you live only once. You only die once. You live lots of times, if you know how.

Tomorrow is no man's gift.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

We've got one life and the older we get the more we come to realize how short it is.

People always say life is short. I've never been convinced of that - mine seems to have a tendency to go on and on.

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

You never know how much time you have left.