Quote

Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.

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
Great
Gains
Whenever
Court
Loss
Risk
Malaise
Chance
Courts
Happiness
Risks
Also
Gain

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Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
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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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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.
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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.
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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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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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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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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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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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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
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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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[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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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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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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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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