Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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
Uneducated
Obnoxious
Guarantee
Guarantees
More quotes by Walker Percy
Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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
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
It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
Walker Percy
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
Walker Percy
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy
I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Walker Percy
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
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
A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
Walker Percy
Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me only the haters seem alive.
Walker Percy
Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
Walker Percy
What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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
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
Children notice things first, people later.
Walker Percy