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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
Wandered
Diversion
Wander
Seriously
Read

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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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The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.
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A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
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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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
Walker Percy
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy
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Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.
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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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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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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.
Walker Percy
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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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I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.
Walker Percy
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I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.
Walker Percy
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You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
Walker Percy
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Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
Walker Percy
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Walker Percy