Walker Percy Quotes

85 quotes in 1330 categories

• Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
• Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
• Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
• Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
• The conviction: I will not tolerate this age. The freedom: the freedom to act on my conviction. And I will act. No one else has…
• But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.
• Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?
• Children notice things first, people later.
• A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
• Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
• Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.
• Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding…
• Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
• The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in…
• 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…
• It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
• Joy and sadness come by turns.
• It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.
• I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
• The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to…

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