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William Faulkner

William Faulkner Quotes

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Famous William Faulkner Quotes

“You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.”

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Author:William Faulkner
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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.”

IfsKnowsWellsChildrenLongHas BeensStatesSpeakSubjectsEmotionalTaughtPeriodsRegardSurprisePainfulViolentIdiotPeculiarDreadConfrontingFinalityIrrevocableBewildermentPainless
Author:William Faulkner
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“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”

KnowsMindI CanEndsBodyRealityRememberMovingYoungSufferingFunctionTownsPhenomenonBereavementFundamentalistTenantsMoving OutNihilistTenements
Book:William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill [and] John Steinbeck
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“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.”

KnowsLifeInspirationalTryingDreamMotivationalCan DoCourageLearningInspirational LifePersonalityHigherSelf ImprovementExcellenceImprovementBotherInsperationalPredecessorsDoing Your BestDreams You HaveChange YourselfTry Your BestImproving YourselfDreams And AspirationsBetter Yourself
Author:William Faulkner
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“I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.”

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Author:William Faulkner
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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.”

KnowsMindWellsSoulSpiritFallEnemyWatchesCuttingColorLoversFleshIntricateCastesHallwaysDeviousCitadelsEggshellsTenements
Author:William Faulkner
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“When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...”

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Author:William Faulkner
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“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.”

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Author:William Faulkner
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“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do -after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”

PeopleKnowsMenWorldChildrenAgeAbleEvilStrongMoralEnvironmentDangerousCapacityTwentiesStrongerPressureAgingFortyAnguishSympathetic
Author:William Faulkner
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