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

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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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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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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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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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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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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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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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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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