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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

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
Consciously
Ordinary
Cultivate

More quotes by Walker Percy

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A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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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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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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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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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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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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Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.
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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.
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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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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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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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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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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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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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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The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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