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There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.

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
Rocks
Single
Reality
Might
Maelstrom
Cling
Unbearable
Rock

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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.
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
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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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Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
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Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
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What's wrong with this world is, it's not finished yet. It is not completed to that point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, It is finished. We made it, and it works.
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I decline to accept the end of man.
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The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.
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Knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets.
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Really the writer doesn't want success. . . . He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall - Kilroy was here - that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.
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We could live like counts. ... If all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel off.
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And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.
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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.
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Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
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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.
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the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
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The whiskey died away in time and was renewed and died again, but the street ran on. From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene.
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We have to start teaching ourselves not to be afraid.
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When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow.
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The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.
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