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I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.

Walker Percy

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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Couldn
Stand
Age
Cannot
Stills
Still
Way
Things
Tolerate

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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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There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
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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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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
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Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
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[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.
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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
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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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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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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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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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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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