Quotes by Walker Percy

“Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is v...”

“Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place...there it is as big as ...”

“My aunt is convinced I have a flair for research. This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I'm not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my a...”

“For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is dea...”

“To tell the absolute truth, I’ve always been slightly embarrassed by Walter’s company. Whenever I’m with him, I feel the stretch of the old tightrope, the necessity of living up to the friendship o...”

“Beauty is a whore.”

“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

“To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends ...”

“What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.”

“He was a young man of pleasant appearance. Of medium height and exceedingly pale, he was nevertheless strongly built and quick and easy in his ways. Save for his deafness in one ear, his physical h...”

“Once again he began to feel bad in the best of environments. And he noticed that other people did too. So bad did they feel, in fact, that it took the worst of news to cheer them up. On the finest ...”

“Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don't like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken....”

“It was no more nor less than true. You do things by doing things, not by not doing them. No more crazy upsidedownness, he resolved. Good was better than bad. Good environments are better than bad e...”

“He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than ...”

“Where does one start with a theory of man if the theory of man as an organism in an environment doesn't work and all the attributes of man which were accepted in the old modern age are now called i...”

“Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the spe...”

“The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people's live were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not the...”

“Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.”