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Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Walker Percy
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Walker Percy
Age: 73 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 28
Died: 1990
Died: May 10
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Physician
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Animals
Creatures
Animal
Nature
Men
Gaps
Speaking
More quotes by Walker Percy
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
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
Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
Walker Percy
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy
But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
Walker Percy
Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Walker Percy
In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
Walker Percy
But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.
Walker Percy
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
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
What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
Walker Percy
Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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
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
The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Walker Percy
Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
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
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
Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Walker Percy
