Quote

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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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Mines
Lowered
Mine
Skinned
Air
Lethal
However
Prophetic
Possible
Thin
Canary
Artist
Test
Whiff
Something
Tests
Canaries
Like
Caught
Shaft

More quotes by Walker Percy

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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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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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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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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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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.
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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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.
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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.
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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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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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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It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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?
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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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