William Faulkner Quotes

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one's individuality.

My grandma used to sing. I feel like it's in our blood!

We're a family with a pretty light sense of humor but, still, on the anniversary of my mom's passing we don't feel like getting 'colorful' and remembering her favorite foods. Every March 5th, the anniversary of her passing, we go to church and are sad for pretty much the rest of the day.

I am like my mom: early to bed and early to rise.

Family habits die hard.

I find great joy in tradition, and, in fact, I seek it.

She could not bear the thought. She simply could not bear the thought that she might somehow prove to her grandfather that her mother had indeed been a fool and her father had been a damned fool and that she was the damnedest fool of them all.

Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.

Every good servant does not all commands.

That afternoon my mother had brought me the roses. "Save them for my funeral," I'd said.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

We are not obedient because we are blind, we are obedient because we can see.

There are few things as nauseating as pure obedience.

These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse.

I dream of songs. I dream they fall down through the centuries, from my distant ancestors, and come to me. I dream of lullabies and sea shanties and keening cries and rhythms and stories and backbeats.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

if she had ordered me to throw myself down then, I would have done it! If she had said it only as a joke, said it with contempt, spitting on me--even then I would have jumped!

It had become usual to give Napoleon the Credit for every Successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, "Under the guidance of our leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days" or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, "thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!".

There certainly are those who worship the state much as divinities are worshipped. Not just the state but even leaders.

The customs of the world are so many conventional follies.

Party spirit enlists a man's virtues in the cause of his vices.

Adolf Hitler may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost 80 million. His success alone proved that I should subordinate myself to this man.