Walker Percy Quotes

Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives.

Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.

Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.

Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.

I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.

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.

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?

In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.

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.

Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

Children notice things first, people later.

It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.

This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.

Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.

[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.

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck-- people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.

I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.

The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.

Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.

It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.

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.

Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?

One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.

Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.

They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.

Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.

Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?