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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
Goodness
World
Destined
Defeated

More quotes by Walker Percy

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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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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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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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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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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 no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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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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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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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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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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