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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.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.
William Faulkner -
Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood - well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner
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Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
William Faulkner -
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.
William Faulkner -
I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie.
William Faulkner -
If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
William Faulkner
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you.
William Faulkner -
Civilization begins with distillation.
William Faulkner -
Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner -
To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.
William Faulkner -
It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.
William Faulkner -
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...
William Faulkner