Quote

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
People
Despairs
Noxious
Stimulating
Hobbies
Suffer
Despair
Since
Suffering

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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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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A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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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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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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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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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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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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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Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls.
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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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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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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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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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