“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, quote from The Last Gentleman
“Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don’t like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“The happiness of the South was very formidable. It was an almost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anything else. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the Constitution, and they were getting rich in the bargain. They had the best of victory and defeat. Their happiness was aggressive and irresistible.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
“For example, she did not mind at all if Christendom should be done for, stove in, kaput, screwed up once and all. She did not mind that the Christers were like everybody else, if not worse.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman
Walker Percy
Born place: in Birmingham, Alabama, The United States
Born date May 28, 1916
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“What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"
"All of them at once," said Bilbo. "And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain.”
― Chuck Dixon, quote from The Hobbit: Graphic Novel
“If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones.”
― Jennifer Weiner, quote from Good in Bed
“Why can't I believe? she asked the darkness.
Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.
It gazed at her. She gazed at it. "You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins," she told it.
Then she fell asleep.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Year of the Flood
“Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, quote from No Exit and Three Other Plays
“The strangest thing about humans is the way they pair up, males and females. Constantly at war with each other, never content to leave each other alone. They never seem to grasp the idea that males and females are separate species with completely different needs and desires, forced to come together only to reproduce
Of course you feel that way. Your mates are nothing but mindless drones, extensions of yourself, without their own identity.
We know out lovers with perfect understanding. Humans invent an imaginary lover and put that mask over the face of the body in their bed.
That is the tradegy of language, my friend. Those who know each other only through symbolic representations are forced to imagine each other. And because their imagination is imperfect, they are often wrong,
This is the source of their misery.
And some of their strength, I think. Your people and mine, each for their own evolutionary reasons, mate with vastly unequal partners. Our mates are always, hopelessly, our intellectual inferiors. Humans mate with beings who challenge their supremcy. They have conflicts between mates, not because their communication is inferior to ours, but because they commune with each other at all.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Xenocide
Shut Out
Unbreakable
Come Away with Me
Skin Game
The Orenda
Fire and HemlockBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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