Quote

Children notice things first, people later.

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
Children
Things
People
Notice
Later
Firsts
First

More quotes by 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
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
Walker Percy
Image
If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
Image
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
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
I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
Walker Percy
Image
I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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
Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
Walker Percy
Image
Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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