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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
Jew
Catholic
Sing
Wait
Mass
Catholics
Waiting
Hymns
Lord
Protestants
Jews

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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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Children notice things first, people later.
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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
Walker Percy
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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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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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Ooooh, Kate groans, Kate herself now. I'm so afraid. I know. What am I going to do? You mean right now? Yes. We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home. Is everything going to be all right? Yes. Tell me. Say it. Everything is going to be all right.
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
Walker Percy
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
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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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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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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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
Walker Percy