Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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
Nervous
Role
Step
Steps
Roles
Makes
People
More quotes by 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
But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
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
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
It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
Walker Percy
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
Walker Percy
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
A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
Walker Percy
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
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
Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.
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
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
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
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker Percy
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
Walker Percy
In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Walker Percy
