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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

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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
Art
Functions
Human
Unpredictable
Humans
Irrational
Men
Considering
Function
Hollywood
Behavior
Universe
Frailty

More quotes by William Faulkner

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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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I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
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It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.
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He was looking at her from behind the smiling that wasn't smiling but was something you were not supposed to see beyond.
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No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.
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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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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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Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.
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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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The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade spaceship and already quarreling about where they are going next.
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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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And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough.
William Faulkner
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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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We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
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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I don't know anything about inspiration because I don't know what inspiration is I've heard about it, but I never saw it.
William Faulkner
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By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.
William Faulkner
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Poor man. Poor mankind.
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Try to be better than yourself.
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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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