Уильям Фолкнер цитаты

страница 6

„Вы не можете плыть за новыми горизонтами, пока у вас не хватит смелости потерять из виду берег.“

„Никогда не бойтесь поднять свой голос за честность, правду и сострадание против несправедливости, лжи и жадности. Если бы люди во всем мире сделали бы это, это изменило бы землю.“

„Как часто я лежал на чуждой крыше под дождем, думая о доме.“

„Я плохой и иду в ад, и мне все равно. Я лучше буду в аду, чем где-то, где есть ты.“

„Мы должны быть свободными не потому, что мы требуем свободы, а потому, что мы ее практикуем.“

„Бойся. Без этого нельзя. Но не трусь. Лесной зверь тебя не тронет, пока у него есть куда отступить или пока он не учуял, что ты трусишь. А труса медведям и оленям надлежит опасаться так же, как и храброму человеку надлежит опасаться труса.“

„Это привилегия писателя - помочь человеку выжить, подняв его сердце.“

„Человек — сумма своего прошлого.“

„Как ни печально, но единственное, что человек может делать восемь часов в день, день за днем, — это работать. Вы не можете есть 8 часов в день, или пить, или заниматься любовью.“

„Человек так мало знает о своих ближних. В его глазах все мужчины - или женщины - действуют из побуждений, которые двигали бы им самим, будь он настолько безумен, чтобы поступать, как другой мужчина - или женщина.“

„Плати за зло чистосердечием, а за добро плати добром.“

„Нужно, ещё не видя зла, быть готовым дать ему отпор, сказать «нет»; нужно сказать «нет», ещё даже не зная, что это такое.“

„Если писатель призван что-то совершить, так это сделать мир чуть лучше, чем он его застал, сделать то, что в его силах, доступным ему способом, чтобы не было такого зла, как война, несправедливость, — вот в чём его работа. И делать это нужно, не описывая всякие приятные вещи, — писатель должен показать человеку его низменные черты, зло, которое человек способен совершить, в то же время ненавидя себя за это зло, которое человек должен преодолеть, вынести и выдержать; чтобы человек всегда верил в то, что он может быть лучше, чем он, вероятно, будет.“

„Даже один взгляд на зло разлагает.“

„Прошлое не мертво. Оно даже не прошлое.“

„Ведь и лжеца можно так запугать, что он скажет правду, - то же самое, как из честного вымучить ложь.“

„Любят не за достоинства, а вопреки недостаткам.“

„Бояться — это значит знать, что живёшь, а делать то, что боишься сделать, это и есть жизнь.“

„Всегда мечтайте и стремитесь к большему, чем вы знаете, что можете достигнуть. Не трудитесь быть лучше своих предшественников или современников. Старайтесь быть лучше самих себя.“

„Плохого виски не бывает. Просто некоторые сорта виски лучше других...“

„Дорогой Бог, позволь мне быть проклятым немного дольше, немного.“

„Человек — это выродившаяся двуногая обезьяна.“

„Невозможно женщин переспорить, и если вы достаточно мудры, или не любите неприятности и шум, вы даже пытаться не станете.“

„Человек долго может жить на деньги, которых ждёт.“

„Человеческий характер — это единственная тема, которая не устаревает.“

„У художника нет времени слушать критиков. Тот, кто стремится быть писателем, читает рецензии, а у того, кто стремится творить литературу, на чтение рецензий нет времени.“

„Большинство мужчин немного лучше, чем их обстоятельства дают им шанс быть.“

„Я верю в Бога, Бога. Боже, я верю в Бога.“

„Он следил за приходом осени, вдыхая крепкий, пьянящий дух октябрьских полдней.“

„Он уже, наверно, убедился, что на свете существуют только три вещи — дыхание, наслажденье, тьма и ничего больше; что без денег не может быть наслажденья, а без наслажденья будет даже не дыхание, а всего лишь заглатывание воздуха протоплазмой и что слепой неорганизм обрушится во тьму, где даже еще не начал брезжить свет.“

„Выливание ликера похоже на сжигание книг.“

„Самое печальное в любви, Джо, заключается в том, что не только любовь не может длиться вечно, но даже скорбь вскоре забудется.“

„... может быть, единственное, что хуже, чем постоянная благодарность - это принимать ее.“

„Ты намереваешься поцеловать меня, и все же у тебя будут все эти чертовы неприятности по этому поводу.“

„Не будьте «писателем». Просто пишите.“

„Мысль катится тихо, спокойно, плавно, выливаясь в спокойные образы, в которых нет ни назойливости, ни укора: нет в них и особого раскаяния. Он видит себя смутной тенью среди теней парадоксальной, в ложном своем оптимизме и эгоизме уверовавшей, будто в той части церкви, которая больше всех заблуждается, истребляя мечту, среди слепых страстей, воздетых рук и громких голосов он обретет то, чего не нашел в неотмирном апофеозе церкви на земле.“

„Это свободная страна. Люди имеют право писать мне письма, а я имею право не отвечать на них.“

„Говорят, будто обман удается опытному лжецу. Но часто опытный, закоренелый лжец обманывает одного себя; легче всего верят лжи человека, который всю жизнь ходил в кандалах правдивости.“

„Между горем и ничего я выберу горе.“

„Я никогда не узнаю, что я думаю о чем-то, пока не прочитаю то, что написал на нем.“

“…between what did happen and what ought to happened, I dont never have trouble picking ought.”

“A gentleman can live through anything.”

“The poets are wrong of course. … But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.”

“Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.”

“…Stevens himself hating horses even more than dogs, rating the horse an unassailable first in loathing since though both were parasites, the dog at least had the grace to be a sycophant too; it at least fawned on you and so kept you healthily ashamed of the human race. But the real reason was, though neither the horse nor the dog ever forgot anything, the dog at least forgave you; and his, Stevens's, thought was that what the world needed was more forgiving.”

“The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much that he can't get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.”

“…women are not interested in truth or romance but only in facts whether they are true or not, just so they fit all the other facts.”

“…even in the folly of youth we know that nothing lasts, but … even in that folly we are afraid that maybe Nothing will last, that maybe Nothing will last forever, and anything is better than Nothing.… So now, as another poet sings, That Fancy passed me by And nothing will remain; which, praise the gods, is a damned lie since, praise, O gods! Nothing cannot remain anywhere since nothing is vacuum and vacuum is paradox and unbearable and we will have nothing of it even if we would, the damned-fool poet's Nothing.”

“…women aren't interested in the romance of dreams; they are interested in the reality of facts, they don't care what facts, let alone whether they are true or not if they just dovetail with all the other facts without leaving a saw-tooth edge.”

“My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.”

“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do — after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”

“"You don't know very much about women, do you?" she said. "Women aren't interested in poets' dreams. They are interested in facts. It doesn't even matter whether the facts are true or not, as long as they match the other facts without leaving a rough seam."”

“Maybe I was completely wrong that morning when I said how women are only interested in facts because maybe men are just interested in facts too and the only difference is, women dont care whether they are facts or not just so they fit, and men dont care whether they fit or not just so they are facts.”

“At least wasn't nobody, no outsider, there to hear it so maybe even before next January he was able to believe hadn't none of it even been said, like miracle: what aint believed aint seen. Miracle, pure miracle anyhow, how little a man needs to outlast jest [just] about anything.”

“Because women are marvellous. They stroll perfectly bland and serene through a fact that the men have been bloodying their heads against for years; whereupon you find that the fact not only wasn't important, it wasn't really there.”

“… maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly all the time, is having to accept it.”

“…girls, women, are not interested in romance but only facts.”

“… so vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.”

“Because as a rule women dont really care about facts just so they fit; it's just men that dont give a damn whether they fit or not.”

“I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”

“…life is not so much motion as an inventless repetition of motion.”

“If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.”

“She wanted to tell me. Maybe she even tried. But she couldn't. It wasn't because I was only twelve. It was because I was her child, created by her and Father because they wanted to be in bed together and nothing else would do, nobody else would do. You see? … Because to the child, he was not created by his mother's and his father's passion or capacity for it. He couldn't have been because he was there first, he came first, before the passion; he created the passion, not only it but the man and the woman who served it; his father is not his father but his son-in-law, his mother not his mother but his daughter-in-law if he is a girl. … and if a boy or a girl really is his father's and her mother's father-in-law or mother-in-law, which would make the girl her brother's mother no matter how much younger she was, then a girl with just one brother and him a twin at that, would maybe be his wife and mother too.”

“Then me too in Paris for the last two weeks, to see if the Paris of Hemingway and the Paris of Scott Fitzgerald (they were not the same ones; they merely used the same room) had vanished completely or not too.”

“Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move — which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.”

“He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat....”

“It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.”

“This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares…. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.”