"Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust."
"What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile."
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Source: Walker Percy (1978). “Love in the ruins: the adventures of a bad Catholic at a time near the end of the world”
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More quotes by Walker Percy
"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."
"Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise."
"To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something."
"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."
"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?"