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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.

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
Alternating
Patient
Dislocation
Identity
Dementia
Loss
Demented
Personal
Characterized
Present
Sentimentality
Age
Possessed
Individual
Sense
Rage

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Children notice things first, people later.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
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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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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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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
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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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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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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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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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Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.
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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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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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