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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.

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
Beats
Writers
South
Many
Good
Produced
Beat

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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.
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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Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.
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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I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
Walker Percy
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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?
Walker Percy
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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
Walker Percy
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy
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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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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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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What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Walker Percy