"With us, when you speak of ‘the river,’ though there be many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting, unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved the Mississippi."
"As with all great teachers, his curriculum was an insignificant part of what he communicated. From him you didn't learn a subject, but a life...Tolerance and justice, fearlessness and pride, reverence and pity, are learned in a course on long division if the teacher has those qualities."
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Source: William Alexander Percy (1973). “Lanterns on the Levee; Recollections of a Planter's Son”, p.4, LSU Press
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"And would it not be proud romance Falling in some obscure advance, To rise, a poppy field of France?"
"It is a very nice world-that is, if you remember that while morals are all-important between the Lord and His creatures, what counts between one creature and another is good manners."
"I have a need of silence and of stars. Too much is said too loudly. I am dazed. The silken sound of whirled infinity Is lost in voices shouting to be heard."
"I suspect anyway that the important things we learn we never remember because they become a part of us, we absorb them...we don't absorb multiplication tables."