Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Look
Eyes
Finger
Looks
Looking
Lions
Long
Eye
Affair
Another
Fingers
Perilous
Someone
Planet
Prolonged
Past
Planets
Owl
Persons
Please
Pleases
Person
Second
Lion
More quotes by Walker Percy
It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
Walker Percy
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
Walker Percy
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
Walker Percy
Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Walker Percy
It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.
Walker Percy
Ooooh, Kate groans, Kate herself now. I'm so afraid. I know. What am I going to do? You mean right now? Yes. We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home. Is everything going to be all right? Yes. Tell me. Say it. Everything is going to be all right.
Walker Percy
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
Walker Percy
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy
The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives.
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
Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
Walker Percy
For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.
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
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
What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
Walker Percy
A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.
Walker Percy
Children notice things first, people later.
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
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy
