Walker Percy - Man Quotes

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

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

Walker Percy
He was a young man of pleasant appearance. Of medium height and exceedingly pale, he was nevertheless strongly built and quick and easy in his ways. Save for his deafness in one ear, his physical health was perfect. Handsome as he was, he was given to long silences. So girls didn't know what to make of him. But men liked him. After a while they saw that he was easy and meant no harm. He was the sort whom classmates remember fondly; they liked to grab him around the neck with an elbow and cuff him around. Good-looking and amiable as he was, however, he did not strike one as remarkable. People usually told him the same joke two or three times.

Walker Percy
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...

Walker Percy
There may be times when the greatest service a novelist can do his fellow man is to follow General Patton's injunction: Attack, attack, attack. Attack the false in the name of the real.

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

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

Walker Percy