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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
Seriously
Read
Wandered
Diversion
Wander

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Walker Percy
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy
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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
Walker Percy
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Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls.
Walker Percy
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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
Walker Percy
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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.
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?
Walker Percy
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In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
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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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
Walker Percy
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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
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Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
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
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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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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
Walker Percy
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
Walker Percy
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
Walker Percy