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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
Comes
Nothing
Like
Howling
Remains
Fields
Desire

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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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[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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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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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.
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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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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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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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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
Walker Percy
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I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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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.
Walker Percy
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In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy