"Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness."
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Quote collection
Walker Percy quotes (page 4 of 5)
89 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place."
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"Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense."
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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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"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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"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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"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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"If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search."
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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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"I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death."
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"Joy and sadness come by turns."
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"It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role."
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"It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity."
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"Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral."
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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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"This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground."
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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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"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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"But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable."
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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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