Quote

The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.

Walker Percy

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Enduring
Endure
Simply
Cannot
Must
Something
Accounted
Shrug

More quotes by Walker Percy

Image
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
Image
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
Walker Percy
Image
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
Image
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy
Image
[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
Image
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
Walker Percy
Image
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
Image
I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
Walker Percy
Image
It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
Walker Percy
Image
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
Walker Percy
Image
Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
Walker Percy
Image
It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
Walker Percy
Image
Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.
Walker Percy
Image
Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
Walker Percy
Image
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Walker Percy
Image
Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
Walker Percy
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Children notice things first, people later.
Walker Percy
Image
You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
Walker Percy