William Faulkner Zitate

seite 7

„Wenn ich die Wahl habe zwischen dem Nichts und dem Schmerz, dann wähle ich den Schmerz.“

„Vielleicht hatten sie recht damit, Liebe in Bücher zu stecken. Vielleicht könnte sie nirgendwo sonst leben.“

„Beim Schreiben musst Du alle Deine Lieblinge töten.“

„Ich bin schlecht und ich werde in die Hölle, und es ist mir egal. Ich wäre lieber in der Hölle, als irgendwo, wo du bist.“

„Es ist, als ob es nicht so sehr darum geht, was ein Kerl tut, sondern die Art und Weise, wie die meisten Leute ihm zusehen, wenn er es tut.“

„Es gab einmal – Merken Sie, wie sich, von der Sonne an dieser Wand hervorgepresst, der Duft der Glyzinie herauslöst und (vom Licht ungehindert) wie in einer heimlichen Weiterleitung von Teilchen zu Teilchen der Myriaden von Elementen der Dunkelheit dieses Zimmer durchdringt? Das ist die Substanz der Erinnerung – Gefühl, Gesicht, Geruch: die Muskeln, mit denen wir sehen, hören und fühlen – nicht Bewusstsein, nicht Denken: So etwas wie Gedächtnis gibt es nicht: Das Gehirn entsinnt sich nur dessen, wonach die Muskeln greifen: nicht mehr, nicht weniger: Und was dabei herauskommt, ist normalerweise ungenau und falsch und verdient nur die Bezeichnung Traum.“

„Mach dir nicht die Mühe besser zu sein als deine
Zeitgenossen oder deine Vorfahren. Versuch nur besser zu sein als du selbst.“

„Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen.“

„Wenn Sie sich nicht ab und zu schämen, sind Sie nicht ehrlich.“

„Wenn Sie das nächste Mal versuchen, jemanden zu verführen, tun Sie es nicht mit Worten. Frauen wissen mehr über Worte als Männer jemals. Und sie wissen, wie wenig sie jemals bedeuten können.“

„Die Dinge, auf die es im Leben wirklich ankommt, kann man nicht kaufen.“

„Man wird geboren, und man versucht dies und das, und man weiß nicht, warum nur man selbst es weiter versucht, und man wird gleichzeitig mit vielen anderen Menschen geboren, lässt sich mit ihnen ein, als versuchte man seine Arme und Beine mit Fäden zu bewegen, als müsste man das, nur dass dieselben Fäden auch an allen anderen Armen und Beinen befestigt sind und die anderen es auch alle versuchen und genauso wenig wissen, warum, außer dass die Fäden sich verheddern, als versuchten fünf, sechs Leute gleichzeitig, auf demselben Webstuhl einen Teppich zu weben, nur will jeder sein eigenes Muster in den Teppich einweben; und es kann keinen Sinn haben, das weiß man, sonst hätten diejenigen, die den Webstuhl aufgestellt haben, alles ein bisschen besser eingerichtet, und doch muss es einen Sinn haben, weil man es immer wieder versucht oder versuchen muss […]“

„Mancher wird erst mutig, wenn er keinen anderen Ausweg mehr sieht.“

„Sie können nicht für neue Horizonte schwimmen, bis Sie den Mut haben, das Ufer aus den Augen zu verlieren.“

„Wir müssen frei sein, nicht weil wir Freiheit beanspruchen, sondern weil wir es praktizieren.“

„Es ist schrecklich, jung zu sein. Es ist schrecklich. Furchtbar.“

„Und natürlich hört auch das Warten auf ... wenn Sie nur lange genug warten können.“

„Ich bin mit zwanzig Jahren älter als viele Menschen, die gestorben sind.“

„Es gibt kein was.“

„Ein Gentleman kann alles durchleben.“

„Es gibt nicht "was war" - nur "was ist". Wenn "war" existieren würde, würde es weder Trauer noch Leid geben.“

„Ich fühle mich wie ein nasser Samen, der in der heißen blinden Erde wild ist.“

„Sei kein Schriftsteller. Sei ein Schreiberling.“

“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.”