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Don't do what you can do - try what you can't do.

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
Trying

More quotes by William Faulkner

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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.
William Faulkner
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Thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked like ninepins.
William Faulkner
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Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was - only is.
William Faulkner
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A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
William Faulkner
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It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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I think the serious things really are the things that make for happiness--people and things that are compatible, love.... So many people are content just to sit around and talk about them instead of getting out and attaining them. As if life were a joke of some kind.
William Faulkner
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Be scared. You can't help that. But don't be afraid.
William Faulkner
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The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
William Faulkner
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That which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples.
William Faulkner
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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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The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.
William Faulkner
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Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.
William Faulkner
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I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone.
William Faulkner
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One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
William Faulkner
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Hemingway shot himself. I don't like a man that takes the short way home.
William Faulkner
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This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.
William Faulkner
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In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.
William Faulkner
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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.
William Faulkner
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Memory believes before knowing remembers. [Light in August]
William Faulkner