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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.

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
Howling
Remains
Fields
Desire
Comes
Nothing
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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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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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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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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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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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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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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.
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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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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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[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.
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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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