Walker Percy Quotes

82 Sourced Quotes

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
You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.

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

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

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

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

Walker Percy
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.

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

Walker Percy
I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others....we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.

Walker Percy
What television and movies give the writer is a new community and a new set of referents.

Walker Percy
Who would want to live with a novelist? A man underfoot in the house all day? A man, moreover, subject to solitary funks and strange elations. If I were a woman, I'd prefer a traveling salesman.

Walker Percy
It was no more nor less than true. You do things by doing things, not by not doing them. No more crazy upsidedownness, he resolved. Good was better than bad. Good environments are better than bad environments.

Walker Percy
Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it.

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

Walker Percy
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!).

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. (2.12).

Walker Percy
A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new.

Walker Percy
My aunt is convinced I have a "flair for research." This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I'm not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded–and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else–I am a genius whom ordinary professions can't satisfy.

Walker Percy
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.

Walker Percy
There is no fashion so absurd, even grotesque, that it cannot be adopted, given two things: the authority of the fashion-setter (Dior, Jackie Onassis) and the vacuity or noughtness of the consumer.

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

Walker Percy
For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.

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
What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.

Walker Percy
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.

Walker Percy
He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn't. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, couldn't, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro.

Walker Percy
Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

Walker Percy
To tell the absolute truth, I've always been slightly embarrassed by Walter's company. Whenever I'm with him, I feel the stretch of the old tightrope, the necessity of living up to the friendship of friendships, of cultivating an intimacy beyond words. The fact is that we have little to say to each other. There is only this thick sympathetic silence between us. We are comrades, true, but somewhat embarrassed comrades. It is probably my fault. For years now I have had no friends. I spend my entire time working, making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women.

Walker Percy
Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.

Walker Percy