Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness. — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“i had spent four years propped on the front porch of the fraternity house, bemused and dreaming, watching the sun shine through… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“Have you noticed that the narrower the view the more you can see? For the first time I understand how old ladies… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“…With pulleys and ropes and time to plan one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people.… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“But if the saleslady means what she says—and since you have gone through any number of such styles in the past— then… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present.… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“At this moment the President is beginning to speak in New Orleans and the Vice-President is mounting the platform at NASA a… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“The salvation of art derives in the best of modern times from a celebration of the triumph of the autonomous self—as in… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
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… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people.… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older… — Walker Percy Copy Share Image
“Do you know what he told me after lying under a cliff for thirty six hours with two inches of his femur sticking out?… — Walker Percy Copy Share
Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history. — Walker Percy Copy Share
“The real wonder is not that the Cosmos is now seen as wonderful but that it is not. Despite its inconceivable vastness, it is… — Walker Percy Copy Share
“Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us… — Walker Percy Copy Share
[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… — Walker Percy Copy Share
For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel,… — Walker Percy Copy Share
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. — Walker Percy Copy Share
“For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero… — Walker Percy Copy Share
“But the expectation of the self, to be informed in its nothingness--if only I can get out of this old place and into the… — Walker Percy Copy Share
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral. — Walker Percy Copy Share
“A variant of the amnesic-plot device is the inadvertent return of the amnesiac to home territory, where he is welcomed by a lovely woman,… — Walker Percy Copy Share
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories. — Walker Percy Copy Share
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the… — Walker Percy Copy Share
“Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have… — Walker Percy Copy Share
