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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
Inside
America
Live
People
Midwestern
Loneliest
Underground
Escape
Sky

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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
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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.
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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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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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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.
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The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 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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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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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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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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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