Quote

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

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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
People
Names
Opportunities
Scarcer
Word
Towns
Blown
Evil
Accomplish
Invent
Opportunity
Everywhere
Gossip
Idea
Harder
Idle
Seems
Seem
Required
Ideas
Single
Privacy
Mind
Small
Town

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That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
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You don't dare think whole even to yourself the entirety of a dear hope or wish let alone a desperate one else you yourself have doomed it.
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I decline to accept the end of man.
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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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Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.
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Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantlyall the time, is having 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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In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world.
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The air brightened, the running shadow patches were now the obverse, and it seemed to him that the fact that the day was clearing was another cunning stroke on the part of the foe, the fresh battle toward which he was carrying ancient wounds.
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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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Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you
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Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
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Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words
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It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
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I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.
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Only when the clock stops does time come to life
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Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.
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You have to write badly in order to write well.
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I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.
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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.
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