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

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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
Doe
Anything
Persons
Person
Even
Discovered
Oneself
Fun
Free

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy
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Children notice things first, people later.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
Walker Percy
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Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy
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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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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.
Walker Percy
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It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
Walker Percy
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Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
Walker Percy
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
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[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
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We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
Walker Percy
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I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.
Walker Percy
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I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
Walker Percy
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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
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
Walker Percy