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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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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Jews
Jew
Catholic
Sing
Wait
Mass
Catholics
Waiting
Hymns
Lord
Protestants

More quotes by 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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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.
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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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
Walker Percy
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If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker Percy
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Walker Percy
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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
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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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
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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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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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There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
Walker Percy
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Walker Percy