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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
Books
Lying
Human
Humans
Book
Always
Condition
Conditions

More quotes by Walker Percy

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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
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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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I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.
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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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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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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
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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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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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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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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
Walker Percy
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy
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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
Walker Percy