Walker Percy Quotes
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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place...there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. (4.3).
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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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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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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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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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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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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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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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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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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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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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Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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.