Walker Percy Quotes
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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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The conviction: I will not tolerate this age. The freedom: the freedom to act on my conviction. And I will act. No one else has both the conviction and the freedom. Many agree with me, have the conviction, but will not act. Some act, assassinate, bomb, burn, etc., but they are the crazies. Crazy acts by crazy people. But what if one, sober, reasonable, and honorable man should act, and act with perfect sobriety, reason, and honor? Then you have the beginning of a new age. We shall start a new order of things.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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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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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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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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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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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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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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.
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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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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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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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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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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[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.