Walker Percy

Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.

— Walker Percy

“Firing the sunset gun”

— Walker Percy

Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

— Walker Percy

Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

— Walker Percy

Joy and sadness come by turns.

— Walker Percy

You can get all A's and still flunk life.

— Walker Percy

Children notice things first, people later.

— Walker Percy

“Soap shining beauty. ”

— Walker Percy

Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

— Walker Percy

Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?

— Walker Percy

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

— Walker Percy

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

— Walker Percy

“People usually told him the same joke two or three times.”

— Walker Percy

I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

— Walker Percy

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

— Walker Percy

In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.

— Walker Percy

“Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a…

— 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

It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to…

— Walker Percy

“Nowadays when a good-looking woman flirts with me, however idly, I guffaw like some ruddy English lord, haw haw, har har, harr…

— Walker Percy

You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not…

— Walker Percy

“...this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.”

— Walker Percy

“I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.”

— Walker Percy

There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at…

— Walker Percy

I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might…

— Walker Percy

“The earth-self observing the Cosmos and trying to understand the Cosmos by scientific principles from which its self is excluded is, beyond…

— Walker Percy

“This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs…

— Walker Percy

Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world…

— Walker Percy

“The self has no sign of itself... For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me,…

— 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…

— Walker Percy

“...the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish…

— Walker Percy

For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster,…

— Walker Percy

“The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes…

— Walker Percy

“Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the…

— Walker Percy

“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

“Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners…

— Walker Percy

“In some evolving civilizations, for reasons which we don't entirely understand, the evolution of consciousness is attended by a disaster of some…

— Walker Percy

“I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is…

— Walker Percy

“ Question (The Great Problematic): Will the ultimate liberation of the erotic from its dialectical relationship with Christianity result in (a) The…

— Walker Percy

“Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book or How you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and…

— Walker Percy