-
Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangest?
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
-
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 -
Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.
Walker Percy -
Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
Walker Percy -
Children notice things first, people later.
Walker Percy -
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
Walker Percy -
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
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 -
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
Walker Percy -
Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
Walker Percy -
She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.
Walker Percy -
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
Walker Percy -
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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 -
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.
Walker Percy -
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.
Walker Percy -
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.
Walker Percy -
If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
Walker Percy -
What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.
Walker Percy
-
Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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 -
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Walker Percy -
You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.
Walker Percy