Top 100 Walker Percy Quotes
#1. Children notice things first, people later.
Walker Percy
#2. That's right. This is only the Hot Stove League." "Oh Lord, what is that?" I say sweating. "We get acquainted, talk over last year's business, kick around the boners of the funds. You'll like it." Sure
Walker Percy
#3. Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French and Spanish two hundred years ago and the Yankees one hundred years ago. 1948. What a faroff time.
Walker Percy
#4. A great scientist once said that genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Walker Percy
#5. In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.
Walker Percy
#6. A letter to Dear Abby: I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It's getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don't know him well enough to discuss money with him.* (f)
Walker Percy
#8. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
Walker Percy
#9. The baby, as I had reason from experience to expect and had in fact prepared my bag for, suffers from dehydration. He's dried up like a prune. The treatment is simple and the results spectacular. Slip a needle in his scalp vein and hang a bottle of glucose
Walker Percy
#10. 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
#12. The drowsiness returns. It is unwelcome. I recognize it as the sort of fitful twilight which has come over me of late, a twilight where waking dreams are dreamed and sleep never comes.
Walker Percy
#13. Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
Walker Percy
#14. Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
Walker Percy
#16. I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink.
Walker Percy
#17. I had spent four years propped on the front porch of the fraternity house, bemused and dreaming, watching the sun shine through the spanish moss, lost in the mystery of finding myself alive at such a time and place.
Walker Percy
#18. Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
Walker Percy
#19. Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
Walker Percy
#20. A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
Walker Percy
#21. Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
Walker Percy
#22. I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
Walker Percy
#23. When these long telephone silences come, it is a sure sign that love is over.
Walker Percy
#24. Dear Mr. Fontenot: Glancing over your portfolio, it struck me that you are not in the best position to take advantage of the dawning age of missiles ...
Walker Percy
#25. Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations.
Walker Percy
#26. What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than in J. C. Penney pantsuits.
Walker Percy
#27. Looking at oneself in a mirror is a self-canceling phenomenon. Eyes looking into eyes make a hole which spreads out and renders one invisible. I had seen more of myself in that single glimpse of a ghostly image in the pier mirror, not knowing it was I.
Walker Percy
#28. My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Walker Percy
#29. A note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they will often tell you not only what is wrong with them but also what is wrong with you.
Walker Percy
#30. The self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption.
Walker Percy
#31. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Walker Percy
#32. It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
Walker Percy
#33. Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
Walker Percy
#34. Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man's destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.
Walker Percy
#35. 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.
Walker Percy
#36. I prefer to live in the South but on my own terms. It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as not to succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South.
Walker Percy
#37. Evening is the best time in Gentilly. There are not so many trees ...
Walker Percy
#38. I lived in the Quarter for two years, but in the end I got tired of Birmingham businessmen smirking around Bourbon Street and the homosexuals and patio connoisseurs on Royal Street.
Walker Percy
#39. Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
Walker Percy
#40. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
Walker Percy
#42. 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.
Walker Percy
#43. Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
Walker Percy
#44. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Walker Percy
#45. This miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.
Walker Percy
#46. [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.
Walker Percy
#47. What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.
Walker Percy
#48. Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Walker Percy
#49. I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.
Walker Percy
#50. In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
Walker Percy
#51. I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all.
Walker Percy
#52. But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
Walker Percy
#53. In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.
Walker Percy
#54. Catastrophe as Catalyst in the Ontology of Joy, or Hurricane Parties on the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Camille: An In-depth Study of Eleven Victims Who Elected to Stay Compared with Eleven Random Control Subjects Who Elected to Leave"?
Walker Percy
#55. Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.
Walker Percy
#56. In my new freedom I remember thinking: If one knows what he wants to do, others will not only not stand in the way but will lend a hand from simple curiosity and amazement.
Walker Percy
#57. People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.
Walker Percy
#58. The truth is I dislike cars. Whenever I drive a car, I have the feeling I have become invisible. People on the street cannot see you; they only watch your rear fender until it is out of their way.
Walker Percy
#59. He believed that there is no end to the mischief and hatred which men harbor deep in themselves and unknown to themselves and no end to their capacity to deceive themselves and that though they loved life, they probably loved death more and in the end thanatos would likely win over eros.
Walker Percy
#60. Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?
Walker Percy
#61. But the expectation of the self, to be informed in its nothingness
if only I can get out of this old place and into the right new place, I can become a new person
places a heavy burden on travel.
Walker Percy
#62. The second I left my old life's cowpath, I discovered I didn't need a drink. It became possible to stand still in the dark under the oaks, hands at my sides, and watch and wait.
Walker Percy
#63. Have you noticed that the narrower the view the more you can see? For the first time I understand how old ladies can sit on their porches for years.
Walker Percy
#64. But we know in the South that the real purpose of manners is to make life easier for everyone, easier both to keep to oneself and to avoid the uneasy commerce of offense and even insult. Either one shakes hands with someone or one ignores him or one kills him. What else is there?
Walker Percy
#65. During my last year in college I discovered that I was picking up the mannerisms of Akim Tamiroff, the only useful thing, in fact, that I learned in the entire four years.
Walker Percy
#66. God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places.
Walker Percy
#67. For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen. The present is surrendered to the past and the future.
Walker Percy
#68. Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Walker Percy
#69. We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away.
Walker Percy
#70. It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the forms of beasts.
Walker Percy
#71. Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
Walker Percy
#72. Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
Walker Percy
#73. Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life or
Walker Percy
#74. I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
Walker Percy
#75. This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Walker Percy
#76. Nowadays when a good-looking woman flirts with me, however idly, I guffaw like some ruddy English lord, haw haw, har har, harr harr.
Walker Percy
#77. Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangest or
Walker Percy
#78. This is another thing about the world which is upside-down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive. Down
Walker Percy
#79. A sharp character - no youth as I feared - a Faubourg Marigny type, Mediterranean, big-nosed, lumpy-jawed, a single stitched-in wrinkle over his eyebrows from just above which there springs up a great pompadour of wiry bronze hair. His face aches with it. He has no use for me at all.
Walker Percy
#80. Polarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience.
Walker Percy
#81. Consider to what extent an "antique" is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self -
Walker Percy
#82. Genius lies not in making the great discoveries, but in seeing the connections between the smaller ones ...
Walker Percy
#83. What does a man live for but to have a girl, use his mind, practice his trade, drink a drink, read a book, and watch the martins wing it for the Amazon and the three-fingered sassafras turn red in October?
Art Immelmann is right. Man is not made for suffering, night sweats, and morning terrors.
Walker Percy
#84. How strange to think that you cannot pass along the discovery.
Walker Percy
#85. The origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver.
Walker Percy
#86. Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls.
Walker Percy
#87. The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Walker Percy
#88. Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.
Walker Percy
#89. Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries.
Walker Percy
#90. Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
Walker Percy
#91. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
Walker Percy
#92. A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
Walker Percy
#93. Tell me something. Why did I have to know the truth about Margot and know it with absolute certainty? Or rather why, knowing the truth, did I have to know more, prove more, see? Does one need to know more, ever more and more, in order that one put off acting on it or maybe even not act at all?
Walker Percy
#94. Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
Walker Percy
#95. Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
Walker Percy
#96. For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.
Walker Percy
#97. 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 ...
Walker Percy
#98. Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
Walker Percy
#99. I have nothing else to offer you but my own happiness. Please say that it, at least, measures up, that it is a proper sort of unhappiness.
Walker Percy
#100. Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man, to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and a feeling of affection and freedom and justice. These words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus strike me as pretty good advice, for even the orneriest young scamp.
Walker Percy
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