Quote

Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

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
Cultivate
Consciously
Ordinary

More quotes by Walker Percy

Image
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
Image
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
Image
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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
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
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy
Image
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
Walker Percy
Image
But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
Walker Percy
Image
What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
Walker Percy
Image
Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
Walker Percy
Image
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
Image
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
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
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
Image
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
Image
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy
Image
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
Walker Percy
Image
Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Walker Percy
Image
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy