Quote

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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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Needs
Eye
Tenderness
Brackets
Made
Girl
Aside
Grieved
Never
Song
Sets
Shadowy
Life
Sense
Sing
Ransom
Past
Smile
Declares
Music
Eyes
Amnesty
Look
Gone
Intolerable
Looks
Start
Puzzles
Discharged

More quotes by Walker Percy

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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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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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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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Children notice things first, people later.
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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.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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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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It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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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.
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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.
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For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
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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.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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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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