Walker Percy Quotes
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I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.
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The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
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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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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
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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.
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Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.
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Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.
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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
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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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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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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.
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Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
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Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
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The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.
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Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
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