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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.

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
Destined
Defeated
Goodness
World

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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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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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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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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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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
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As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
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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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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
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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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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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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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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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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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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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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy