Quote

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
Bigs
Settling
Littles
Search
Little
Kissing
Thigh
Thing
Warm
Thighs
Way
Car
Kisses
Good
Drink
Drinks
Deep
Happiness
Settle

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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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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me only the haters seem alive.
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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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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.
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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.
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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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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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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.
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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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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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You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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