Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

You can get all A's and still flunk life.

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.

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

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.

Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.

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.

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.

I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

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.

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck-- people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.

In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.

Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.

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

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.

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

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

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

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.

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

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

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.

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

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

Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

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.

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

Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

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?

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

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.

Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.

The conviction: I will not tolerate this age. The freedom: the freedom to act on my conviction. And I will act. No one else has both the conviction and the freedom. Many agree with me, have the conviction, but will not act. Some act, assassinate, bomb, burn, etc., but they are the crazies. Crazy acts by crazy people. But what if one, sober, reasonable, and honorable man should act, and act with perfect sobriety, reason, and honor? Then you have the beginning of a new age. We shall start a new order of things.

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

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?

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.

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

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.

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

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

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

You live in a deranged age, more deranged than 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.

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

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.

I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.