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Quotes of the day: William Faulkner
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Published Wednesday, September 24, 2014 @ 7:59 PM EDT
Sep 24 2014

William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most important writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)

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A gentleman can live through anything.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.

A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not 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 doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.

Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he, alone among creatures, has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

I decline to accept the end of man.

If I were reincarnated, I'd want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates or envies him, or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered and he can eat anything.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.

It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work

Maybe the only thing worse than having to give gratitude constantly is having to accept it.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world... would do this, it would change the earth.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?

Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

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.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I’d take Scotch. It’s the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find.

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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