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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

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
Death
Order
Sometimes
Writing
Novelists
Think
Avoid
Thinking
Boring
Sex
Write

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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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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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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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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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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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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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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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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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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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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 nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
Walker Percy
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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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Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.
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Children notice things first, people later.
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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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
Walker Percy
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
Walker Percy