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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

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
Stuffed
Boredom
Bored
Blessing
Self

More quotes by Walker Percy

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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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Children notice things first, people later.
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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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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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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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It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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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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Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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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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Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
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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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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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