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ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crisis with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.

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
Given
Ingenuity
Order
Supply
Truth
Apparently
May
Guard
Men
Sounds
Shapes
Crisis
Sound

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I think that-that anyone, the painter, the musician, the writer works in a-a kind of an-an insane fury. He's demon-driven. He can get up feeling rotten, with a hangover, or with-with actual pain, and-and if he gets to work, the first thing he knows, he don't remember that pain, that hangover-he's too busy.
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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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I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
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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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If you could just ravel out into time. That would be nice. It would be nice if you could just ravel out into time
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Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
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The salvation of the world is in man's suffering.
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Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?
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It seems impossible for a man to learn the value of money without first having to learn to waste it.
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I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail...because he has a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
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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.
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A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn.
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They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.
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Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport he is a Kentuckian too.
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If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.
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Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
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If there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it.
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It's because I'm alone.. If I could just feel it, it would be different, because I would not be alone. But if I were not alone, everybody would know it. And he could do so much for me, and then I would not be alone. Then I could be all right alone.
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Idleness breeds our better virtues.
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He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.
William Faulkner