A Quote by 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.
Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.
There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.
The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.
O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.
I always know that people will only remember me for my efforts in Calgary which, I must admit, seem without doubt to have kept the name alive. But I honestly love law and really hope it can take off for me. I'm going for it.
There's this thing in Hollywood about the sympathetic character and likability. I've never understood that because the people I love most in my life are not likable all the time. My wife is not always likable. I'm certainly not always likable. My dad is not always likable. We're human beings.
We Germans carried our hatred from the First World War to the Second World War, and now you are about to carry the hatred about the murder of 5 million people on to another World War.
If some people can imagine that a person they love is alive in another world, why can't I imagine Maurice is alive in this one An artist is a person who uses art to run away from reality. It's not wrong-it's survival. There's nothing wrong with me creating a world in which Maurice is alive.
Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?
Money drives the world, but when everything falls apart to leave the underpinnings of our life bare to the scrutiny of critics and thieves, the only thing remaining, the only thing that can't be taken away, is the love you hold for the people you care about.
I put up with the music business because I understand that I'm in the tradition, I'm in a tradition that's of far greater importance than the business I seem to be in. Everywhere I go in the world, people ask me about the business that I seem to be in, but I'm not really in that business.
To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.
I think that the glorious thing about the human race is that it does change the world -- constantly. The world or 'life' may seem to more often overwhelm the human being's capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating.
It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.
All the world was before me and every day was a holiday, so it did not seem important to which one of the world's wildernesses I first should wander.
There was another thing I heartily disbelieved in - work. Work, it seemed to me even at the threshold of life, is an activity reserved for the dullard. It is the very opposite of creation, which is play… The part of me which was given up to work, which enabled my wife and child to live in the manner which they unthinkingly demanded, this part of me which kept the wheel turning - a completely fatuous, ego-centric notion! - was the least part of me. I gave nothing to the world in fulfilling the function of breadwinner; the world exacted its tribute of me, that was all.
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