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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.

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
Times
Hate
Cuteness
Better
Corrupted
Love
Sentimentality
Serves
Hatred
Honest
Maybe

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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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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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It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
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As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
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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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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
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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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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?
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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.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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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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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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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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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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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
Walker Percy
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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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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 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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