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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
Writing
Good
Baffling
Like
Intrigue
Title
Titles
Metaphor
Obvious
Without
More quotes by 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
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
Walker Percy
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
Walker Percy
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
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
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
Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
Walker Percy
But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
Walker Percy
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
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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
Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Walker Percy
Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
Walker Percy
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
It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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
It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
Walker Percy
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
The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Walker Percy
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
