William Faulkner Quotes
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True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
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Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.
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I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
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Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
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I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.
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I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
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Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
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I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
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Wonder. Go on and wonder.
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Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.
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It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
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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.
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Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
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All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
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War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
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She forced herself once more to think of nothing, to keep her consciousness immersed, as a little dog that one keeps under water until he has stopped struggling.
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Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.
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If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green... If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and probably won't.
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I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.
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If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
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He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
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Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones.