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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

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
Proust
Cake
Alcohol
Piece
Pieces
Doe
Bourbon

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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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.
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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
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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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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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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
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Children notice things first, people later.
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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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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
Walker Percy
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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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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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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy
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There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
Walker Percy