Walker Percy Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

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. (2.9).

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

Walker Percy
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

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

Walker Percy
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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Walker Percy
Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?

Walker Percy
What interests me as a novelist is not the malevolence of man—so what else is new?

Walker Percy
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?

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

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

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
What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.

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.

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.

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
He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.

Walker Percy
They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself — ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.

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.

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

Walker Percy
A novelist these days has to be an ex-suicide. A good novel…is possible only after one has given up and let go.

Walker Percy