William Faulkner Quotes on Children (5 Quotes)


    That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.


    When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they don't really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not yet be old enough to desire the fruits of it ... his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it.

    If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. . . . If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.

    And that's how the book grew. That is, I wrote that same story four times. None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed it in the four sections. That was not a deliberate tour de force at all, the book just grew that way. That I was still trying to tell one story which moved me very much and each time I failed, but I had put so much anguish into it that I couldn't throw it away, like the mother that had four bad children, that she would have been better off if they all had been eliminated, But she couldn't relinquish any of them. And that's the reason I have the most tenderness for that book, because it failed four times.



    More William Faulkner Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Time - Art - Life - People - Books - World - Children - Sadness - Pride - Facts - Mothers - Courage - Place - Fear - Vice & Virtue - Danger & Risk - Success - God - View All William Faulkner Quotations

    More William Faulkner Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Absalom, Absalom!
    - As I Lay Dying
    - Light in August
    - The Sound and the Fury

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