"A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious."
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Quote collection
Walker Percy quotes (page 3 of 5)
89 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?"
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"Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history."
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"I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age."
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"Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North."
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"Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries."
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"Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected."
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"Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious."
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"Children notice things first, people later."
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"Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man."
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"Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself."
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"Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition."
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"Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat."
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"Consciously cultivate the ordinary."
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"Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past."
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"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."
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"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."
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"I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free."
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"A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle."
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"[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."
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