William Faulkner citáty

strana 7

„Nikdy se nebojte zvýšit svůj hlas pro poctivost, pravdu a soucit proti nespravedlnosti, lhaní a chamtivosti. Pokud by to lidé po celém světě dělali, změnilo by to Zemi.“

„Možná měli pravdu, když vkládali lásku do knih. Možná by nemohla žít nikde jinde.“

„Jak často jsem lehávala v dešti na jakési podivné střeše a myslela na domov.“

„Jsem špatný a půjdu do pekla a je mi to jedno. Raději budu v pekle než kdekoli, kde jsi ty.“

„Vždy sněte a střílejte výš než víte, že můžete. Nesnažte se být lepší než vaši současníci nebo vaši předkové. Snažte se být lepší než vy sami.“

„Lidé mají děti, aby jejich prostřednictvím napravili své chyby, které nadělali.“

„Nic tak neoslabuje charakter člověka jako myšlenka, že najde životní štěstí v něčem jiném než ve vlastní práci.“

„Na špatné lidi je možné se spolehnout. Přinejmenším se totiž nemění.“

„Chceme-li získat lidi, musíme je považovat za takové, za jaké se sami považují.“

„Na špatné lidi se můžeme spolehnout. Ti se aspoň nemění.“

„Spisovatel je slavný až tehdy, když ho víc citují, než čtou.“

„Sláva je jako žena - bude ti věrná, když s ní budeš zacházet s velkou dávkou lhostejnosti.“

„Věřím v Boha, Bože. Bože, věřím v Boha.“

„Někteří se stanou odvážnými až tehdy, když už nemají jiné východisko.“

„Nikdy nepoužil slovo, kvůli kterému by čtenář musel zalistovat ve slovníku.“

„Pokud je ve vás příběh, musí vyjít.“

„Muž, který odstraní horu, začíná odnášením malých kamenů.“

„Jednoho dne se ožení a na krátkou chvíli budou prožívat tu krátkou, neskutečnou blaženost, která sama v sobě nese svou pomíjivost, a proč se tudíž radovat. A uchovají si, snad si na ni dokonce uchovají vzpomínky do doby, kdy tělo už nemá tělu co říci, protože alespoň paměť trvá.“

„Srdce je nestálé. Jak jinak by mohlo udržovat v člověku život.“

„Kdo shromažďuje uschlou růži?“

„Vylévání alkoholu je jako pálení knih.“

„A nebyl dost starý na to, aby promluvil a zároveň neřekl nic.“

„Gentleman přijímá odpovědnost za své činy a nese břemeno jejich důsledků.“

„Jistě, dokonce i čekání skončí... pokud vydržíte dostatečně dlouho čekat.“

„Chceme být volní ne proto, že vyžadujeme svobodu, ale proto, že ji praktikujeme.“

„Pokud bych si mohl vybrat mezi bolestivou zkušeností a ničím, vybral bych si bolest.“

„Když se příště pokusíte někoho svést, nedělejte to slovy. Ženy vědí o slovech více než muži. A vědí, jak málo mohou někdy znamenat.“

„Cítím se jako mokrý zárodek divočiny v horké slepé zemi.“

„Při psaní musíte zabít všechny své miláčky.“

„Nebuďte "spisovatelem". Jen pište.“

“He recognised its voice. It was the young hound which even a year ago had had no judgment and which, by the lights of the other hounds anyway, still had none. Maybe that’s what courage is, he thought.”

“He was only ten. It seemed to him that he could see them, the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mortality and himself who shared a little of it. Because he recognised now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs and tasted in his own saliva, recognised fear as a boy, a youth recognises the existence of love and passion and experience which is his heritage but not yet his patrimony, from entering by chance the presence of perhaps even merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been loved by many men.”

“She accepted that—not reconciled: accepted-- as though there is a breathing-point in outrage where you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, Thank God that is all; at least I know it all.”

“Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?”

“You see, if I could believe that I shall see and touch him again, I shall not have lost him. And if I have not lost him, I shall never have had a son. Because I am I through bereavement and because of it. I do not know what I was nor what I shall be. But because of death, I know that I am. And that is all the immortality of which intellect is capable and flesh should desire. Anything else is for peasants, clods, who could never have loved a son well enough to have lost him.”

“We never thought, sitting in my office on those afternoons, discussing Voltaire and Ingersoll, that we would ever be brought to this, did we?You, the atheist whom the mere sight of a church spire on the sky could enrage; and I who have never been able to divorce myself from reason enough even to accept your pleasant and labor-saving theory of nihilism.”

“Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.”

“Darl is our brother, our brother Darl. Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying lightly in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.”

“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”

“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”

“It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books; I wish I had enough sense to see ahead thirty years ago, and like some of the Elizabethans, not signed them. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.”

“No man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment.”

“Dont you see?”

“I am beginning to see the first sign of my increasing age: I dont like to know that my orders have been disobeyed, even when I knew when I gave them that they would be.”

“I told you once how I believe it isn't love that dies, it's the man and the woman, something in the man and the woman that dies, doesn't deserve the chance any more to love.”

“… the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I had never actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the sum of love is what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself.”

“Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?”

“Happens is never once.”

“It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.”

“...ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.”

“Poor man. Poor mankind.”

“For the holy are susceptible too to evil, even as you and I, signori; they too are helpless before sin without God's aid… and the holy can be fooled by sin as quickly as you or I, signori. Quicker, because they are holy.”

“Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.”

“Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.”

“Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.”

“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.”

“Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.”

“When people act like niggers, no matter who they are, the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger.”

“Why that’s a hundred miles away. That’s a long way to go just to eat.”