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
Despair
Since
Suffering
People
Despairs
Noxious
Stimulating
Hobbies
Suffer

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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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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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In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
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Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
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Children notice things first, people later.
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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
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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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But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
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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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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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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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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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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
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What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.
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But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.
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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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Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.
Walker Percy
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The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives.
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