"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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Quote collection
William Faulkner quotes (page 11 of 20)
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means."
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"I decline to accept the end of man."
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"It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it."
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"People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too."
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"Who gathers the withered rose?"
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"Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error."
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"And sure enough, even waiting will end...if you can just wait long enough."
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"I draw no petty social lines. A man to me is a man, wherever I find him."
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"The writer has three sources: imagination, observation, and experience"
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"The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true."
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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."
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"The past isn't over. It isn't even past."
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"She wouldn't say what we both knew. 'The reason you will not say it is, when you say it, even to yourself, you will know it is true: is that it? But you know it is true now. I can almost tell you the day when you knew it is true. Why won't you say it, even to yourself?' She will not say it."
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"All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't."
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"Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written."
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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."
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"This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward."
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"Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too."
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"When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't."
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