William Faulkner Quotes
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The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
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There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
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Gettysburg. . . . You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.
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True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
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It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible
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Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.
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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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Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
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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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Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.
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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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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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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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You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
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It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.
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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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Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
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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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It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
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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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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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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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I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.