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

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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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Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.
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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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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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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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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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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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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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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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[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.
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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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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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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
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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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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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