Walker Percy Quotes

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

You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

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

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

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.

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

In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.

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

Children notice things first, people later.

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

Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joy and sadness come by turns.

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.