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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

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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
Walker Percy
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As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
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
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The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Walker Percy
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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
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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
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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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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
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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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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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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Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
Walker Percy
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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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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Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
Walker Percy
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
Walker Percy
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Joy and sadness come by turns.
Walker Percy
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
Walker Percy
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Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
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For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
Walker Percy