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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

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
Hiding
Worse
Losing
Hope
Something

More quotes by Walker Percy

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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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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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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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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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Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
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Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.
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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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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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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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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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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.
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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
Walker Percy
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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
Walker Percy