William Faulkner Quotes

Death is an awful thing. I don't believe in it myself.

I think that nothing teaches you more about life than death and dying.

Except for the young or very happy, I can't say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

Passing away" is written on the world and all the world contains.

When you suffer a loss, there is before the death and after the death - those become your two existences and your two realities.

"When the dead are done with the living, the living can go on to other things," Franny said. "What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"

All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist

If suddenly you do not exist, If suddenly you are not living, I shall go on living. I do not dare, I do not dare to write it, if you die. I shall go on living.

I was living my own future and my brother's lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen - into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death.

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.

The problem with death is absence

A death is the most terrible of facts.

When you get to my age, you find that most of your dear friends are gone.

Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.

You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us

I’m always feeling death, and that is a part of life. When you know a lot of people, you will always experience death.

the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.

My dad died, and my grandfather died, and my great-grandfather died. And the guy before him, I don't know. Probably died.

What greater pain could mortals have than this: To see their children dead before their eyes?

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

Then, with an enormous rush of meadow-filled wind, the green candle went out, and my best friend died.

When Mother died I was both freed and abandoned, as are we all at this profound juncture in our lives.

Noting his mother's visit to Las Vegas the weekend before she died. She got to go to heaven four days early.

Do not pity the dead, Harry.

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.