Walker Percy Quotes
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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.
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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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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
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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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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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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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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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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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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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You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.
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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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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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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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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.