Walker Percy Quotes
Collection of top 79 famous quotes about Walker Percy
Walker Percy Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Walker Percy quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
— Walker Percy
Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
— Walker Percy
Joy and sadness come by turns.
— Walker Percy
Genius lies not in making the great discoveries, but in seeing the connections between the smaller ones ...
— Walker Percy
New Orleans may be too seductive for a writer.
— Walker Percy
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
— Walker Percy
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
— Walker Percy
People usually told him the same joke two or three times.
— Walker Percy
Fiction doesn't tell us something we don't know, it tells us something we know but don't know that we know.
— Walker Percy
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
A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
— Walker Percy
The self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption.
— Walker Percy
But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
— Walker Percy
If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
— Walker Percy
Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive.
— Walker Percy
There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
— Walker Percy
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
— Walker Percy
God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places.
— Walker Percy
Soap shining beauty.
— Walker Percy
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
— Walker Percy
Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
— Walker Percy
All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life.
— Walker Percy
Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
— Walker Percy
What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.
— Walker Percy
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
— Walker Percy
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
— Walker Percy
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
— Walker Percy
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
— Walker Percy
Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
— Walker Percy
Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
— Walker Percy
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
— Walker Percy
I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
— Walker Percy
Children notice things first, people later.
— Walker Percy
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
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
Firing the sunset gun
— Walker Percy
Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
— Walker Percy
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
— Walker Percy
Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.
— Walker Percy
The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
— Walker Percy
I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?
— Walker Percy
It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
— Walker Percy
Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
— Walker Percy
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
— Walker Percy
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
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
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
— Walker Percy
The origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver.
— Walker Percy
A writer worth his salt is probably better off in an adversarial relation with the U.S. Senate.
— Walker Percy
This miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.
— Walker Percy
What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than in J. C. Penney pantsuits.
— Walker Percy
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
— Walker Percy
Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries.
— Walker Percy
A great culture is recognizable through its artists and its saints and not by its GNP.
— Walker Percy