"People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it."
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Quote collection
William Faulkner quotes (page 7 of 20)
383 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I knew that nobody but a luckless man could ever need a doctor in the face of a cyclone."
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"When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar."
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"It's not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it's when you realize that you don't need any aid."
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"the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat"
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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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"I am not one of those women who can stand things."
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"I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."
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"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....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."
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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."
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"Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them."
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"She was the captain of her soul"
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"In every writer there is a certain amount of the scavenger."
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"Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything."
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"Between grief and nothing, I will take grief."
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"I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better."
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"It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless."
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"Life is a process of preparing to be dead for a long time."
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"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible."
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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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