Motherhood Quote by William Faulkner

Faulkner’s line lands like a dirty joke told in church: shock first, then recognition. He frames artistic ambition as a kind of holy criminality, where the masterpiece justifies the ugliest means. The punch is the grotesque exchange rate - “any number of old ladies” for Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” - a deliberately tasteless arithmetic that forces you to confront what we quietly reward in “great” artists: obsession, selfishness, collateral damage.

The intent isn’t to endorse literal theft from your mother; it’s to strip the romance off authorship. Faulkner is mocking the pious image of the writer as sensitive moral witness. Instead, he casts the writer as a predator of experience, willing to exploit family, memory, even love for material. “Mother” is the most loaded victim possible: origin, duty, the one person you’re supposed to protect. If you’ll rob her, you’ll rob anyone, and that’s the point. Art, in this view, is made from transgression - not always illegal, but often intimate, extracting what shouldn’t be taken.

Context matters: Faulkner wrote out of the American South’s wreckage - inherited guilt, class hierarchy, racial terror - and his novels repeatedly dramatize how private loyalties get sacrificed to larger, brutal narratives. He also knew the marketplace’s hypocrisy: we sanctify the finished object, then politely avert our eyes from the human costs behind it. The quote’s cynical wit is a dare and a confession: if you want the urn, don’t pretend your hands will stay clean.