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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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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Person
Second
Lion
Look
Eyes
Finger
Looks
Looking
Lions
Long
Eye
Affair
Another
Fingers
Perilous
Someone
Planet
Prolonged
Past
Planets
Owl
Persons
Please
Pleases
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
Children notice things first, people later.
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
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Walker Percy
But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
Walker Percy
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
It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
Walker Percy
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy
Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
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
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
Walker Percy
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
Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
Walker Percy
One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.
Walker Percy
Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Walker Percy
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy
