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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.
William Faulkner -
A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.
William Faulkner
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People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
William Faulkner -
In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.
William Faulkner -
It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget.
William Faulkner -
Our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere -- systems political or religious or racial or national -- will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.
William Faulkner -
My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.
William Faulkner -
This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
William Faulkner
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Caddy smelled like trees.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol - cross or crescent or whatever - that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race.
William Faulkner -
Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner -
Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.
William Faulkner -
She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.
William Faulkner -
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
William Faulkner
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Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
William Faulkner -
I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
William Faulkner -
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
William Faulkner -
They say love dies between two people. That’s wrong. It doesn’t die. It just leaves you, goes away, if you aren’t good enough, worthy enough. It doesn’t die; you’re the the one that dies. It’s like the ocean: if you’re no good, if you begin to make a bad smell in it, it just spews you up somewhere to die. You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just this was for an epitaph.
William Faulkner