Walker Percy Quotes
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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?
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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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.
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Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
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Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.
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You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.
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[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.