{
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  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-alexander-percy/lanterns-on-the-levee/i-never-heard",
  "json": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-alexander-percy/lanterns-on-the-levee/i-never-heard.json",
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  "slug": "i-never-heard",
  "text": "I never heard them over their juleps express a philosophy of life, and if I had it would have been incomprehensible to me, but a philosophy was implicit in all their thoughts and actions. It probably made the Southern pattern. Perhaps it is all contained in a remark of Father's when he was thinking aloud one night and I sat at his feet eavesdropping eagerly: \"I guess a man's job is to make the world a better place to live in, so far as he is able – always remembering the results will be infinitesimal – and to attend to his own soul.\" (Ch. 7)",
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  "author": {
    "name": "William Alexander Percy",
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  "book": {
    "title": "Lanterns On The Levee",
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  "topics": [
    {
      "name": "responsibility",
      "slug": "responsibility",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/responsibility"
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    {
      "name": "meaning of life",
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    "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Alexander_Percy#Lanterns_on_the_Levee_(1941)",
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  "added_at": "2026-09-25T23:03:50",
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      "slug": "honor-and-honesty",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-alexander-percy/lanterns-on-the-levee/honor-and-honesty",
      "text": "Honor and honesty, compassion and truth are good even if they kill you, for they alone give life its dignity and worth. (Ch. 24)",
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      "slug": "that-short-period",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-alexander-percy/lanterns-on-the-levee/that-short-period",
      "text": "That short period of my life spent in the line is the only one I remember step by step – as if it moved sub specie aeternitatis. Not that I enjoyed it; I hated it. Not that I was fitted for it by temperament or ability, I was desperately unfitted; but it, somehow, had meaning, and daily life hasn't: it was part of a common endeavor, and daily life is isolated and lonely. (Ch. 17, on his service on the Western Front in World War I)",
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      "slug": "what-i-wrote",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-alexander-percy/lanterns-on-the-levee/what-i-wrote",
      "text": "What I wrote seemed to me more essentially myself than anything I did or said. It often gushed up almost involuntarily like automatic writing, and the difficulty lay in keeping the hot gush continuous and unselfconscious while at the same time directing it with cold intellect into form. I never could write in cold blood. The results were intensely personal, whatever their other defects. (Ch. 12, on writing poetry)",
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