Walker Percy Quotes
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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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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.
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He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.
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A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.
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Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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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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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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Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
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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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Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
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Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
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Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
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Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
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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.