William Faulkner Quotes

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness.

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.

My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.

Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood.

At night I dream about going to where I played when I was still young.

Let a man turn to his own childhood - no further - if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.

The kids are so much fun. I'm always taking a look over at what they're doing because it reminds me of when I was so small before.

I always cling to things that remind me of being a kid again.

Reading 'IT' again as an adult, you understand it from a different perspective. It is basically a love letter to childhood and talks about all of the treasures of that time, like imagination and belief, that are inevitably lost in adulthood.

I was a book-y child. I was much more book-y than dark.

If there is any realm where distinction is especially difficult, it is the realm of childhood memories, the realm of beloved images harbored in memory since childhood. These memories which live by the image and in virtue of the image become, at certain times of our lives and particularly during the quiet age, the origin and matter of a complex reverie: the memory dreams, and reverie remembers.

I think the world that I grew up in was like being in this sort of magical artistic garden.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.

Things can be seen better in the darkness," he said, as if he had just seen into her mind. "But the longer you spend in the dark, the harder it becomes to return to the world aboveground where the light is

I might not remember how the sky looked on any given day. I do remember, though, what it was like to be a boy beneath a sky.

When I was little the sky was closer.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

I loved being a child. If I do have a talent, it's not so much being an artist, but it's being able to remember back to that time.

I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there... I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity... Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then.

All I've ever wanted to do is darken the day and brighten the night.

Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?

Mexico is only a memory of childhood safety.

As a little girl I loved the thought of playing dress-up and getting ready.