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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
Maybe
Times
Hate
Cuteness
Better
Corrupted
Love
Sentimentality
Serves
Hatred
Honest

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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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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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But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.
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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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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me only the haters seem alive.
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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Children notice things first, people later.
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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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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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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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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.
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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.
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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
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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.
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