Walker Percy quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Walker Percy

Walker Percy Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Walker Percy on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

Joy and sadness come by turns.

Genius lies not in making the great discoveries, but in seeing the connections between the smaller ones ...

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

We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away.

New Orleans may be too seductive for a writer.

Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

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

People usually told him the same joke two or three times.

Fiction doesn't tell us something we don't know, it tells us something we know but don't know that we know.

Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.

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

The self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption.

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

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

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.

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

Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive.

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the forms of beasts.

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

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

God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places.

Soap shining beauty.

How strange to think that you cannot pass along the discovery.

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

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

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

A great scientist once said that genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

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.

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal.

What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.

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

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

You can get all A's and still flunk life.

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

Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

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

Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.

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

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

Children notice things first, people later.

Nowadays when a good-looking woman flirts with me, however idly, I guffaw like some ruddy English lord, haw haw, har har, harr harr.

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

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.

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.

Firing the sunset gun

Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

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

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

Just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn't mean that God does not exist.

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

Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.

When these long telephone silences come, it is a sure sign that love is over.

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

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 ...

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

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

The origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver.

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

A writer worth his salt is probably better off in an adversarial relation with the U.S. Senate.

This miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.

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

Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.

Misery misery son of a bitch of all miseries.

A great culture is recognizable through its artists and its saints and not by its GNP.

Evening is the best time in Gentilly. There are not so many trees ...

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.

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.

At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.