Daily Inspiration Quote by William Faulkner

Faulkner’s mule is a perfect Southern allegory: long-suffering on the surface, secretly keeping accounts. The line lands because it flips the sentimental story we like to tell about loyalty and hard work. Ten years of “willingly and patiently” reads like virtue, even devotion, until the punchline reveals it as strategy. The mule isn’t noble; it’s biding time. Faulkner’s cynicism is quieter than, say, Mencken’s, but it’s just as cutting: endurance can be less a moral quality than a negotiated truce between power and resentment.

The specific intent is warning dressed as barnyard humor. He’s describing a psychology familiar in hierarchical societies - the plantation afterlife, the rigid class systems of the Jim Crow South, the marriage, the workplace. People (and animals) who can’t openly resist often convert obedience into leverage. The “privilege” is the sharpest word in the sentence: it mocks the language of patronage and gratitude, the way authority expects the exploited to feel honored by proximity to control. By calling revenge a privilege, Faulkner skewers the entire moral theater of benevolent mastery.

Context matters because Faulkner writes out of a region obsessed with codes: pride, duty, restraint, deference. His characters frequently absorb humiliation as a kind of long game, storing it until it detonates. The mule’s kick is that detonation - not justice, not liberation, just one clean moment of reclaimed agency that makes a decade of submission suddenly look like a setup.