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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.

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
Truth
Almost
Exalted
Even
Wrong
Terrified
Really
Simple
Poets
Always
Natural
Instinct
Hate
Poet
Speak
Interested
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True
Course

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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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Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.
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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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You could do so much for me if you just would. If you just knew. I am I and you are you and I know it and you don't know it and you could do so much for me if you just would and if you just would then I could tell you and then nobody would have to know it except you and me.
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I don't want money badly enough to work for it.
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Poor man. Poor mankind.
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Civilization begins with distillation
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Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.
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Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
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You have to write badly in order to write well.
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Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.
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A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
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Our freedom must be buttressed by a homogeny equally and unchallengeably free, no matter what color they are, so that all the other inimical forces everywhere -- systems political or religious or racial or national -- will not just respect us because we practice freedom, they will fear us because we do.
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If there is a God what the hell is He for?
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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...
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Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar.
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Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
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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.
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Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.
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Curiosity is a mistress whose slaves decline no sacrifice.
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