Walker Percy Quotes
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Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
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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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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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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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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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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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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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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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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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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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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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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[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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They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.