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All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

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
Impossible
Splendid
Dream
Match
Base
Failed
Rate
Perfection
Failure
Dreams

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Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.
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This is a free country. Folks have a right to send me letters, and I have a right not to read them.
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Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept… The plastic asshole of the world.
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You have to write badly in order to write well.
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A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.
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Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.
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It's terrible to be young. It's terrible. Terrible
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Fear is the most damnable, damaging thing to human personality in the whole world.
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The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.
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Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.
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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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Only when the clock stops does time come to life
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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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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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People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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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.
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I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.
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Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
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To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
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They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
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