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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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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
People
Noticed
Illness
Disaster
Death
Real
Time

More quotes by Walker Percy

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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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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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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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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
Walker Percy
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There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
Walker Percy
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Walker Percy
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Walker Percy
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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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 did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
Walker Percy
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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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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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
Walker Percy
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
Walker Percy
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.
Walker Percy