Best 93 quotes of Walker Percy on MyQuotes

Walker Percy

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    Walker Percy

    A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

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    Walker Percy

    Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.

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    Walker Percy

    A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

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    Walker Percy

    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.

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    Walker Percy

    As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

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    Walker Percy

    Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.

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    Walker Percy

    For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.

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    Walker Percy

    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.

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    Walker Percy

    Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

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    Walker Percy

    Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

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    Walker Percy

    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.

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    Walker Percy

    Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    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?

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    Walker Percy

    I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.

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    Walker Percy

    If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.

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    Walker Percy

    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.

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    Walker Percy

    Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.

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    Walker Percy

    I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

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    Walker Percy

    I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    [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.

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    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.

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    Walker Percy

    In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.

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    Walker Percy

    I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

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    Walker Percy

    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.

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    Walker Percy

    It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    Joy and sadness come by turns.

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    Walker Percy

    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.

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    Walker Percy

    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.

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.

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    Walker Percy

    My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

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    Walker Percy

    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.

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    Walker Percy

    Ooooh," Kate groans, Kate herself now. "I'm so afraid." "I know." "What am I going to do?" "You mean right now?" "Yes." "We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home." "Is everything going to be all right?" "Yes." "Tell me. Say it." "Everything is going to be all right.

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    Walker Percy

    Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

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    Walker Percy

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

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    Walker Percy

    Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.

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    Walker Percy

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