Walker Percy Quotes

Walker Percy offers a reflective look at identity, freedom and the surprise of new experiences.

31 quotes

1. 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. [citation needed]

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

3. She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere. [citation needed]

4. 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. [citation needed]

5. 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. [citation needed]

6. The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off. [citation needed] Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature? Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?

7. She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness. [citation needed]

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

9. Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it. [citation needed]

10. A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new. [citation needed]

11. Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx--my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me--we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!) [citation needed]

12. Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place...there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. [citation needed]

13. Where does one start with a theory of man if the theory of man as an organism in an environment doesn't work and all the attributes of man which were accepted in the old modern age are now called into question: his soul, mind, freedom, will, Godlikeness? There is only one place to start: the place where man's singularity is there for all to see and cannot be called into question, even in a new age in which everything else is in dispute. That singularity is language... [citation needed]

14. Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature? Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures? [citation needed]

15. 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? [citation needed]

16. 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? [citation needed]

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

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

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

20. [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.

21. 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.

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

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

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

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

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