Quote

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
Bored
Dog
Species
Circumstances
Gets
Goes
Sleep
Men
Boredom

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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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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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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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Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your 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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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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To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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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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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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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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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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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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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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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
Walker Percy