Quote

We cannot choose freedom established on a hierarchy of degrees of freedom, on a caste system of equality like military rank. We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

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
Freedom
Equality
Free
Claims
Cannot
Degrees
Caste
Must
Choose
Castes
Like
Military
Rank
System
Hierarchy
Liberty
Established
Practice
Claim

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History is not was, it is.
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A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
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I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is I've heard about it, but I never saw it.
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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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Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
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Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.
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I suppose that people, using themselves and each other so much by words, are at least consistent in attributing wisdom to a still tongue.
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It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours he can't drink for eight hours he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.
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The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.
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I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
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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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And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless october, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dog and the echo of louis' voice dying away
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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.
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When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.
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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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The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.
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You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.
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The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.
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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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There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn't fool with booze until he's fifty then he's a damn fool if he doesn't.
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