Quote

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

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
Every
Hold
Motion
Years
Since
Artificial
Life
Moving
Moves
Means
Aim
Artist
Fixed
Art
Stranger
Looks
Later
Mean
Hundred
Arrest

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It feels almost soft, like something to be caressed. Only gold feels that way.
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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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No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
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Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.
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The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.
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Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
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History is not was, it is.
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To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
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We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while it's not always.
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I am not one of those women who can stand things.
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It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.
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It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was.
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...and you don't even have to sleep alone, you don't even have to sleep at all and so, all you have to do is show the stick to the dog now and then and say, 'Thank God for nothing.'
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It's all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won't be over until tomorrow.
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It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
William Faulkner
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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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People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
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Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.
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It's because I'm alone.. If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.
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A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
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