William Faulkner Quotes on Time (11 Quotes)


    And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.

    I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.


    It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.



    For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.... William Faulkner, Intruder In The Dust.

    I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.

    The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

    Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

    He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others just a shape to fill a lack that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.

    I'm glad I haven't got the sort of conscience I've got to nurse like a sick puppy all the time.


    More William Faulkner Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Time - Life - People - Art - World - Books - Pride - Children - Sadness - Facts - Mothers - Will & Determination - Danger & Risk - God - Reasoning - Place - Vice & Virtue - Countries - 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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