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As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.

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
Suffering
People
Despairs
Noxious
Stimulating
Hobbies
Suffer
Despair
Since

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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.
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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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Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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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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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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I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
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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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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
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Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
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