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I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him.
William Faulkner -
Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
William Faulkner
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You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
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 -
I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner -
The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.
William Faulkner -
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
William Faulkner -
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in a novel and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.
William Faulkner
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Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
William Faulkner -
God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man--the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn't put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn't quite God himself yet.
William Faulkner -
Only when the clock stops does time come to life.
William Faulkner -
A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
William Faulkner -
He the writer must, teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and compassion and sacrifice. See Poets & Writers.
William Faulkner -
You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
William Faulkner
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Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
William Faulkner -
I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
William Faulkner -
Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.
William Faulkner -
Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner -
We shall not kill and maybe next time we even won't.
William Faulkner
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She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it's going to be in words.
William Faulkner -
I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
William Faulkner -
I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.
William Faulkner -
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.
William Faulkner