Walker Percy Quotes
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Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don't like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and take up with the wrong people.
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Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
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In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
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Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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Children notice things first, people later.
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In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
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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.
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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.
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If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?
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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?
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My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
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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.
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A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new.
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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.
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Beauty is a whore.
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What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.
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Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
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Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.