William Faulkner Quotes
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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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Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
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I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!
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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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What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, "It is finished. We made it, and it works.
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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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And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away.
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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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Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
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Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.
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I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
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You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
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People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
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A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
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People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
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Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
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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...
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I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
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It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
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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.
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Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets.
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The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in.
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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.
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It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.