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
Like
Caught
Shaft
Mines
Lowered
Mine
Skinned
Air
Lethal
However
Prophetic
Possible
Thin
Canary
Artist
Test
Whiff
Something
Tests
Canaries

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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
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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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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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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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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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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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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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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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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me only the haters seem alive.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
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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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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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