Quote

It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books. [] It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: he made the books and he died.

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
Died
Sentence
Life
Shall
Aim
Effort
Sentences
Books
Refuse
Individual
Leaving
Abolished
History
Ambition
Epitaph
Book
Private
Printed
Made
Save
Bent

More quotes by William Faulkner

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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.
William Faulkner
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I listen to the voices.
William Faulkner
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Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.
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I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I'm going to give her. That's the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.
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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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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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Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time.
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In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger.
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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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True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth.
William Faulkner
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As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
William Faulkner
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To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
William Faulkner
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One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat...nor make love for eight hours...
William Faulkner
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...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
William Faulkner
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Pointless. . . . Like giving caviar to an elephant.
William Faulkner
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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?
William Faulkner
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The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quite solvent business.
William Faulkner
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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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Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
William Faulkner
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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