Life's Pleasures Quote by William Faulkner

Faulkner’s dream of returning as a buzzard is misanthropy sharpened into comedy: a wish for radical unimportance. The bird isn’t noble, beautiful, or even especially alive in the romantic sense. It’s tolerated. It survives on what everyone else refuses to look at. That’s the point. In a world Faulkner spent his career describing as thick with family obligation, social scrutiny, and inherited guilt, the buzzard is the ultimate escape hatch: a creature exempt from the Southern economy of reputation.

The line works because it pretends to be a simple preference while quietly indicting the human condition. “Nothing hates him or envies him” sketches a social universe where hatred and envy are baseline weather. “Wants him or needs him” is the darker twist: to be wanted is to be trapped in someone else’s story, to be needed is to be conscripted. Faulkner, who wrote about people chained to bloodlines and the past, imagines a form of reincarnation that deletes the ledger entirely.

There’s also an artist’s subtext hiding in the scavenger. The buzzard lives by consuming aftermath. Faulkner’s fiction does something similar: it circles ruins, feeds on what’s left of lost causes and broken households, turning decay into narrative. The final clause, “he can eat anything,” lands like a bleak punchline and a writerly credo. To survive - to keep making meaning - you develop a stomach for whatever life leaves on the roadside.