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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.

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

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Walker Percy
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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy
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What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
Walker Percy
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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
Walker Percy
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
Walker Percy
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
Walker Percy
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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.
Walker Percy
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
Walker Percy
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Walker Percy
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
Walker Percy