Quote

Living is one constant and perpetual instant when the arras-veil before what-is-to-be hangs docile and even glad to the lightest naked thrust if we had dared, were brave enough (not wise enough: no wisdom needed here) to make the rending gash.

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
Needed
Veils
Wise
Thrust
Gash
Wisdom
Perpetual
Rending
Living
Instant
Lightest
Enough
Naked
Docile
Even
Glad
Dared
Make
Brave
Hangs
Life
Constant
Veil

More quotes by William Faulkner

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He is thinking quietly: I should not have got out of the habit of prayer.
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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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Did you ever have a sister? did you?
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I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
William Faulkner
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It wasn't until the Nobel Prize that they really thawed out. They couldn't understand my books, but they could understand $30,000.
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Civilization begins with distillation
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Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
William Faulkner
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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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The past is never dead. It's not even past.
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I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.
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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.
William Faulkner
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I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.
William Faulkner
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Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
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What a writer's obituary should read - he wrote the books, then he died.
William Faulkner
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And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
William Faulkner
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When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
William Faulkner
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They will endure. They are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices are vices aped from white men or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion-not laziness: evasion: of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even comfort but his own.
William Faulkner
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Mississippi begins in a lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the Gulf of Mexico
William Faulkner