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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.

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
Writer
Described
Gone
Writes
Picturesque
Someone
Southern
Cabin
Thought
Locals
Cabins
Might
Local
Writing
Scene
Uncle
Something
Danger
Uncles
Like
Wind
Toms

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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.
Walker Percy
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
Walker Percy
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
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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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
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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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
Walker Percy
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
Walker Percy
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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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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
Walker Percy
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
Walker Percy
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If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker Percy
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy