Walker Percy Quotes
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away.
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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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.
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
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Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
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Ooooh," Kate groans, Kate herself now. "I'm so afraid." "I know." "What am I going to do?" "You mean right now?" "Yes." "We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home." "Is everything going to be all right?" "Yes." "Tell me. Say it." "Everything is going to be all right.
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The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.
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There is no fashion so absurd, even grotesque, that it cannot be adopted, given two things: the authority of the fashion-setter (Dior, Jackie Onassis) and the vacuity or noughtness of the consumer.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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You live in a deranged age, more deranged that 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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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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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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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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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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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.
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In all honesty it was easier to believe it in cool Long Island for its very outrageousness where nobody believed anything very seriously than in hot Carolina where everybody was a Christian and found unbelief unbelievable.
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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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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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
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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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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
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One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.