William Faulkner Quotes
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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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Wonder. Go on and wonder.
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
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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.
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The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.
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Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.
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Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
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If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
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War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
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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 took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie.
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To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.
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Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.
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We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
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You're looking, sir, at a very dull survivor of a very gaudy life. Crippled, paralyzed in both legs. Very little I can eat, and my sleep is so near waking that it's hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.
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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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Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
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You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
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The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
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And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
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Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
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I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
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To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.