William Faulkner Quotes
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Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.
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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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Love in the young requires as little of hope as of desire to feed upon.
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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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If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us.
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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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War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
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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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Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
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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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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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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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Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico.
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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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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.
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You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
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To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.
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They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
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People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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Civilization begins with distillation.
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A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
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Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?