Walker Percy Quotes
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He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.
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It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
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Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls.
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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.
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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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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?
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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.
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You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.
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I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.
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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.