William Faulkner Quotes
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You can't. You just have to.
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Pouring out liquor is like burning books.
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It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.
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Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
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Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.
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All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't.
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We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
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...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
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The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten.
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Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
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Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
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She was the captain of her soul.
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They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.
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I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.
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The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
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Well, Bud," he said, looking at me, "I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?
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Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
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A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune.
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
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If a story is in you, it has to come out.
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When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.
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He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
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I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.
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She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.