Quote: Because We Lost the War

When The Moviegoer won the National Book Award, Walker Percy was asked why there were so many good Southern writers. "Because we lost the War," he said, and Flannery O'Connor later glossed his remark with startling eloquence. "What he was saying is that we have had our Fall," she explained. "We have gone into the world with an inburnt sense of human limitations, and with a sense of mystery that could not have developed in our first state of innocence—as it has not developed sufficiently in the rest of the country."