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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
Substitutes
Past
Better
Something
Abolish
Substitute

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Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
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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.
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The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.
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Teach yourself by your own mistakes people learn only by error.
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She was the captain of her soul
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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.
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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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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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Only when the clock stops does time come to life
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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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It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible
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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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It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
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Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
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When ideas come, I write them when they don't come, I don't.
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Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
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A dream is not a very safe thing to be near... I know I had one once. It's like a loaded pistol with a hair trigger: if it stays alive long enough, somebody is going to be hurt. But if it's a good dream, it's worth it.
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That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
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They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
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