William Faulkner Quotes
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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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A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
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It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible
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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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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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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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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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Had Passion and Purity never encountered, Tenderness had never come into the world.
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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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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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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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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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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 knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.
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It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
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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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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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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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Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
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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.
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Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.