Walker Percy Quotes

85 quotes in 1330 categories

• Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
• I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
• Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
• A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
• In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
• In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is…
• 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…
• Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and…
• It is not a bad thing to settle for the Little Way, not the big search for the big happiness but the sad little happiness…
• The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
• 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…
• As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
• Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.
• This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
• 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.
• 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,…
• To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.
• Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
• But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write…
• Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

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