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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

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
Diversion
Wander
Seriously
Read
Wandered

More quotes by Walker Percy

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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Walker Percy
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Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.
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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.
Walker Percy
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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.
Walker Percy
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What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
Walker Percy
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
Walker Percy
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
Walker Percy
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
Walker Percy
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
Walker Percy
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Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me only the haters seem alive.
Walker Percy
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A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.
Walker Percy
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For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.
Walker Percy
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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
Walker Percy
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I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
Walker Percy
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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
Walker Percy
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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
Walker Percy
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But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.
Walker Percy