Quote

A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

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
Good
Baffling
Like
Intrigue
Title
Titles
Metaphor
Obvious
Without
Writing

More quotes by Walker Percy

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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.
Walker Percy
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
Walker Percy
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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
Walker Percy
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
Walker Percy
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You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Walker Percy
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Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
Walker Percy
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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
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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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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
Walker Percy
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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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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Children notice things first, people later.
Walker Percy
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
Walker Percy
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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
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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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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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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy