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The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself

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
Thing
Conflict
Worth
Human
Humans
Writing
Heart

More quotes by William Faulkner

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It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.
William Faulkner
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It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
William Faulkner
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I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
William Faulkner
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Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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Only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while.
William Faulkner
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A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
William Faulkner
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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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How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie
William Faulkner
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To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
William Faulkner
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Though children can accept adults as adults, adults can never accept children as anything but adults too.
William Faulkner
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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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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.
William Faulkner
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Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.
William Faulkner
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The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
William Faulkner
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The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.
William Faulkner
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She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.
William Faulkner