"Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust."
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Quote collection
Walker Percy quotes (page 1 of 5)
89 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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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"Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise."
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"To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something."
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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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"How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?"
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"I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?"
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"We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away."
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"In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished."
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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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"Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him."
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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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"Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?"
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"You can get all A's and still flunk life."
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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 difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to."
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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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"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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"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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"Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him."
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