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Let the past abolish the past when -- and if -- it can substitute something better.

William Faulkner

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William Faulkner
Age: 64 †
Born: 1897
Born: September 25
Died: 1962
Died: July 6
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New Albany
Mississippi
William Cuthbert Faulkner
William Falkner
William Cuthbert Falkner
Abolish
Substitute
Substitutes
Past
Better
Something

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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
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A hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven 'sure-fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.
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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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I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
William Faulkner
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It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to his name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family.
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Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity.
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Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That's why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.
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Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.
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I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
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The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
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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.
William Faulkner
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You like orchids?... Nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men, their perfume has the rotten sweetness of corruption.
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Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
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War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
William Faulkner
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
William Faulkner
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By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]
William Faulkner
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I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.
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The past isn't over. It isn't even past.
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