The Wild Palms Quotes

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“Love doesn't die; the men and women do.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“If Jesus returned today we would have to crucify him quick in our own defense, to justify and preserve the civilization we have worked and suffered and died shrieking and cursing in rage and impotence and terror for two thousand years to create and perfect in mans own image; if Venus returned she would be a soiled man in a subway lavatory with a palm full of French post-cards--”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“be.—Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old. Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. --Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“… when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.—Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief.”
― William Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

“I found out some time back that it’s idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities – contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone, good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures — eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun — than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“Listen: it’s got to be all honeymoon, always.
Either heaven, or hell:
no comfortable safe peaceful purgatory between
for you and me to wait in until good behavior or forbearance
or shame or repentance overtakes us.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“Dicono che l'amore tra due persone muoia. È sbagliato. Non muore. Ti lascia, se ne va, se tu non sei bravo abbastanza. Non muore; sei tu quello che muore. È come l'oceano: se non vai bene, se cominci a dar cattivo odore, ti rigurgita in qualche posto a morire. Muori in ogni caso, ma io preferisco annegare nell'oceano piuttosto che esser gettata su una striscia di spiaggia morta e seccarmi al sole e ridurmi a una chiazza schifosa senza neanche il nome sopra, solo 'Questa roba fu' come epitaffio.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“Po jakimś czasie człowiek przyzwyczaja się, zapomina i nawet nie czuje, że zimno, bo zapomniał, co to jest ciepło.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“He would have to get up sometime, he knew that, just as all life consists of having to get up sooner or later and then having to lie down aganin sooner or later after a while. And he was not exactly exhausted and he was not particularly without hope and he did not especially dread getting up. It merely seemed to him that he had accidentally been caught in a situation in which time and environment, not himself, was mesmerised; he was being toyed with by a current of water going nowhere, beneath a day which would wane toward no evening; when it was done with him it would spew him back into the comparatively safe world he had been snatched violently out of and in the meantime it did not much matter just what he did or did not do.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“Laughter is the yesterday's slight beard, the negligee among emotions.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“... Christmas... the apotheosis of the bourgeoisie, the season when with shining fable Heaven and Nature, in accord for once, edict and postulate us all husbands and fathers under our skins, when before an altar in the shape of a gold-plated cattle-trough man may with impunity prostrate himself in an orgy of unbridled sentimental obeisance to the fairy tale which conquered the Western world, when for seven days the rich get richer and the poor get poorer in amnesty: the whitewashing of a stipulated week leaving the page blank and pristine again for the chronicling of the fresh...”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms