Quote

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?

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
Look
Eyes
Finger
Looks
Looking
Lions
Long
Eye
Affair
Another
Fingers
Perilous
Someone
Planet
Prolonged
Past
Planets
Owl
Persons
Please
Pleases
Person
Second
Lion

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The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives.
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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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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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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.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
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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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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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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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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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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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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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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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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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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy