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The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Walker Percy

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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Become
Onto
Something
Search
Would
Spirituality
Life
Despair
Aware
Possibility
Anyone
Sunk
Spiritual
Undertake

More quotes by Walker Percy

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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.
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What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
Walker Percy
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.
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There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
Walker Percy
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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
Walker Percy
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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
Walker Percy
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy
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Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
Walker Percy
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
Walker Percy