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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.

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
Human
Humans
Book
Always
Condition
Conditions
Books
Lying

More quotes by Walker Percy

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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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.
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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.
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It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
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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
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A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
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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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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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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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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.
Walker Percy
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Walker Percy
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
Walker Percy
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Ooooh, Kate groans, Kate herself now. I'm so afraid. I know. What am I going to do? You mean right now? Yes. We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home. Is everything going to be all right? Yes. Tell me. Say it. Everything is going to be all right.
Walker Percy
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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy