When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William FaulknerRead
It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Regret often stems from the small, unnoticeable habits we form over time.
In this quote, Faulkner reflects on the nature of regret, suggesting that it is not grand failures that haunt us but rather the accumulation of trivial habits and actions. The metaphor of Christ being 'worn away' by the 'minute clicking of little wheels' implies that consistent, minor neglect of purpose or intention can lead to significant deterioration of one's life or spirit.
Themes
RegretHabitsDecisionsLifeReflection
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about self-improvement, you might phrase it as a reminder to avoid idle habits that lead to future regret.
More from William Faulkner
All quotes →I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
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When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
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Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
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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 any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
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The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.
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