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

More quotes by Walker Percy

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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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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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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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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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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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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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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
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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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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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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
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For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.
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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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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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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.
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