Quote

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

Walker Percy

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Every
Believe
Men
Secretly
Possibility
Lucky
Open
Doe

More quotes by Walker Percy

Image
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.
Walker Percy
Image
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
Walker Percy
Image
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
Image
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.
Walker Percy
Image
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
Walker Percy
Image
Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.
Walker Percy
Image
Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
Walker Percy
Image
Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
Image
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
Image
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
Image
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
Walker Percy
Image
What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
Walker Percy
Image
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.
Walker Percy
Image
Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me only the haters seem alive.
Walker Percy
Image
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy
Image
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
Walker Percy
Image
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Walker Percy
Image
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.
Walker Percy
Image
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Walker Percy
Image
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.
Walker Percy