Quote

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.

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
Place
Rotate
Around
Deciding
Problem
Balls
States
Using
Like
Americans
People
Serious
Free
Billiard
United
Ricochet

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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 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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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
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One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.
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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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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?
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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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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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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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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.
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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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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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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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