Quote

Joy and sadness come by turns.

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
Sadness
Joy
Turns
Come

More quotes by 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
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
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
Walker Percy
Image
I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
Walker Percy
Image
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy
Image
In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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
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
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
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
Walker Percy
Image
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
Image
Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
Walker Percy
Image
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
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
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
Image
Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
Image
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
Image
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Walker Percy