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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.

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
Free
Doe
Anything
Persons
Person
Even
Discovered
Oneself
Fun

More quotes by 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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I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.
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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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
Walker Percy
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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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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.
Walker Percy
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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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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.
Walker Percy
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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
Walker Percy
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
Walker Percy
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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
Walker Percy
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Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
Walker Percy
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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.
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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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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
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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
Walker Percy
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What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy