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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.

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
Dog
Species
Circumstances
Gets
Goes
Sleep
Men
Boredom
Bored

More quotes by Walker Percy

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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
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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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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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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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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
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Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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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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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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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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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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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
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Ooooh, Kate groans, Kate herself now. I'm so afraid. I know. What am I going to do? You mean right now? Yes. We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home. Is everything going to be all right? Yes. Tell me. Say it. Everything is going to be all right.
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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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[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.
Walker Percy
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
Walker Percy
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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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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy