Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
Walker Percy
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Fun
Free
Doe
Anything
Persons
Person
Even
Discovered
Oneself
More quotes by Walker Percy
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
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
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.
Walker Percy
One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.
Walker Percy
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
Walker Percy
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.
Walker Percy
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Walker Percy
Children notice things first, people later.
Walker Percy
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
Walker Percy
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
But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
Walker Percy
[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
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
Walker Percy
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy
In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
Walker Percy
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy