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Children notice things first, people later.

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
Notice
Later
Firsts
First
Children
Things
People

More quotes by Walker Percy

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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
Walker Percy
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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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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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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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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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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.
Walker Percy
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
Walker Percy
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What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.
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.
Walker Percy
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What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
Walker Percy
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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?
Walker Percy
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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.
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
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
Walker Percy