Quotes by Walker Percy

“How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself b...”

“....With pulleys and ropes and time to plan one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldnt anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time.”

“Just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn't mean that God does not exist.”

“It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with ...”

“What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. ...”

“As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.”

“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, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous aff...”

“You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

“I am consoled only to see that I was not mistaken: Chicago is just as I remembered it. I was here twenty five years ago. My father brought me and Scott up to see the Century of Progress and once la...”

“You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

“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.”

“Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.”

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

“Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing les...”

“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night o...”

“How much better it would be if they weren't so damn understanding--if they kicked me out of the house. To find yourself out in the street with two dollars to your name, to catch the streetcar downt...”

“Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears...”

“Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French an...”

“Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.”

“Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you...”