Walker Percy Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all Walker Percy Quotes
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walker Percy