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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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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
World
Defeated
Goodness
Victory
Fighting
Less
Anything
Must
Men
Destined

More quotes by Walker Percy

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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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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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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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[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.
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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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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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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.
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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.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
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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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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.
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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Walker Percy
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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Walker Percy