William Faulkner Quotes
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It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
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How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.
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This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
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A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.
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I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as when he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself.
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It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
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Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having to accept it.
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We have all heard what we wanted to hear! Truth that sounds right to our ears!
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Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
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A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
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In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.
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My, my. A body does get around.
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I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
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Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
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We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
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I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.
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A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
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You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.
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I listen to the voices.
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There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
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I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
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When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
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I believe in God, God. God, I believe in God.