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

More quotes by Walker Percy

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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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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 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.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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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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Children notice things first, people later.
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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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I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.
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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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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
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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.
Walker Percy
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
Walker Percy
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For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
Walker Percy