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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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For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.
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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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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Joy and sadness come by turns.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
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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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
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As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
Walker Percy
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy
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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
Walker Percy
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Walker Percy
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
Walker Percy