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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.

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
Little
Kissing
Thing
Warm
Thigh
Way
Car
Thighs
Good
Drink
Kisses
Deep
Drinks
Happiness
Settle
Bigs
Settling
Littles
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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.
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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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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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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.
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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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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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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.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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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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.
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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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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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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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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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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