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Idleness breeds our better virtues.

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
Better
Breeds
Idleness
Virtues
Virtue

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I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
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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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Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
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Who is he who will affirm that there must be a web of flesh and bone to hold the shape of love?
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You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
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I am not one of those women who can stand things.
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She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it.
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No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
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Necessity has a way of obliterating from our conduct various delicate scruples regarding honor and pride.
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Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
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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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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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All men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away.
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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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Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
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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.
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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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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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People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
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To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.
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