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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.

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
Underground
Escape
Sky
Inside
America
Live
People
Midwestern
Loneliest

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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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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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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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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.
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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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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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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
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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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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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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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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
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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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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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