Quote

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.

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
World
Though
Nevertheless
Whether
Liberal
Read
Strikes
Fact
Library
Periodicals
Facts
Whenever
Enlivened
Feel
Conservative
Remaining
Feels
Hatred
Controversial
Life
Bears
Signs

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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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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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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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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.
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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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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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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The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives.
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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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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.
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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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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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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
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