Daily Inspiration Quote by William Faulkner

Insomnia becomes a courtroom here, and Faulkner stacks the jury with your own failures. “Tomorrow night” is a sly temporal trap: the future arrives not as possibility but as punishment, pre-booked for a bout you can’t skip. By calling it “nothing but,” he strips away romantic ideas of night as rest, privacy, or renewal. What’s left is a bleak determinism that feels characteristically Faulknerian: time isn’t linear progress, it’s a knot you keep tightening.

The phrase “one long sleepless wrestle” does heavy work. “Wrestle” suggests intimacy as much as conflict: you’re pinned to the bed with your thoughts, locked in close contact with what you’d rather keep at arm’s length. It’s physical language for a mental process, the body enlisted as collateral in the mind’s ongoing war. “Yesterday’s omissions” cuts sharper than “mistakes.” Omissions are the sins of passivity, the moments you didn’t choose, didn’t speak, didn’t act. They implicate not just moral failure but character: regret born from who you are when nobody forces your hand.

Context matters: Faulkner writes from a culture haunted by the past, from the American South’s mythic memory to families and individuals unable to outrun what’s already been done or left undone. The subtext is that the past doesn’t stay put; it colonizes the future, turning “tomorrow” into a rerun of “yesterday.” The line works because it refuses catharsis. No redemption arc, no clean morning-after. Just the exhausting insight that time advances while the self stays stuck, grappling in the dark.