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

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The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.
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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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Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.
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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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There is that might-have-been which is the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality.
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A man is the sum of his misfortunes.
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People ... have tried to evoke God or devil to justify them in what their glands insisted upon.
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A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.
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The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
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Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?
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The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.
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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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Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.
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She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.
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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.
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To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
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Our most treasured family heirloom are our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
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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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Did you ever have a sister? did you?
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When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
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