Quote

Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.

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
Work
Failing
Article
Men
Takes
Grant
Brain
Published
Lord
Grants
Knowledge
Articles
Help
Destruction
Helping
Increase
Place
Lead

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Children notice things first, people later.
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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.
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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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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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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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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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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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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.
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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.
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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
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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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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
Walker Percy
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[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.
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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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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