Walker Percy Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.”
-- Walker Percy -
“I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?”
-- Walker Percy -
“Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.”
-- 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.”
-- Walker Percy -
“Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.”
-- Walker Percy -
“In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.”
-- Walker Percy -
“You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
-- 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 -
“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”
-- Walker Percy -
“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.”
-- Walker Percy -
“Children notice things first, people later.”
-- Walker Percy -
“One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.”
-- Walker Percy -
“Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?”
-- Walker Percy -
“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?”
-- Walker Percy -
“A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.”
-- Walker Percy -
“Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.”
-- 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 -
“Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?”
-- Walker Percy -
“Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.”
-- Walker Percy -
“In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.”
-- Walker Percy -
“Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.”
-- Walker Percy -
“The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.”
-- 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 -
“Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?”
-- Walker Percy -
“Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.”
-- Walker Percy -
“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.”
-- Walker Percy
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