William Faulkner Quotes
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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.
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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.
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In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it's like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn't matter and he said, That's what's so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn't it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That's why that's sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.
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If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time.
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This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
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My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.
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Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
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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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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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That's sad too, people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today.
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The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true.
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Caddy smelled like trees.
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'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop.
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Only when the clock stops does time come to life.
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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.
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I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.
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You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
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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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A fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.