Quote

Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.

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
Wrenching
Southerner
North
Sadness
Nobody
Cities

More quotes by Walker Percy

Image
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
Image
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Walker Percy
Image
Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
Walker Percy
Image
You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
Walker Percy
Image
A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
Walker Percy
Image
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
Walker Percy
Image
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.
Walker Percy
Image
If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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
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.
Walker Percy
Image
I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
Walker Percy
Image
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
Image
Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
Walker Percy
Image
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy
Image
Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.
Walker Percy
Image
Joy and sadness come by turns.
Walker Percy
Image
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
Walker Percy
Image
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
Walker Percy
Image
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.
Walker Percy
Image
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.
Walker Percy