Painting with words

As a blogger, brief writer, and occasional author or editor of articles, I sometimes fall into this conceit of thinking that I'm a Writer. Then I read something that reminds me that of the difference between my kind of writing and the kind of writing that, say, Walker Percy did, is; it's like the difference between painting a house and painting the Mona Lisa. Take, for instance, this passage by Walker Percy, from Signposts in a Strange Land. Walker is describing his uncle, Will Percy, who raised him from the age of 13 to adulthood:

For his eyes were the most memorable, a piercing gray-blue and strangely light in my memory, as changeable a shadows over water, capable of passing in an instant, we were soon to learn, from merriment—he told the funniest stories we'd ever heard—to a level gray gaze cold with reproof. They were beautiful and terrible eyes, eyes to be careful around. Yet now, when I try to remember them, I cannot see them otherwise than as shadowed by sadness.