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Joy and sadness come by turns.

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
Joy
Turns
Come
Sadness

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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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[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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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
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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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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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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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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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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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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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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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?
Walker Percy
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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy
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Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
Walker Percy
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy