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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
Might
Maelstrom
Cling
Unbearable
Rock
Rocks
Single
Reality
More quotes by William Faulkner
It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.
William Faulkner
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
William Faulkner
To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.
William Faulkner
A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.
William Faulkner
People everywhere are about the same, but ... it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.
William Faulkner
I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Surely heaven must have something of the color and shape of whatever village or hill or cottage of which the believer says, This is my own.
William Faulkner
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
William Faulkner
There is something about jumping a horse over a fence, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
William Faulkner
A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.
William Faulkner
I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
William Faulkner
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station….
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
The writer's only responsibility is to his art...If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.
William Faulkner
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.
William Faulkner
Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.
William Faulkner
It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid.
William Faulkner
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
