Top 100 Walker Percy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Walker Percy

2. “You can get all A’s and still flunk life.”

— Walker Percy

3. “In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.”

— Walker Percy

4. “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 to be less than a man.”

— Walker Percy

5. “Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.”

— Walker Percy

6. “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.”

— Walker Percy

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

— Walker Percy

8. “Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.”

— Walker Percy

9. “Joy and sadness come by turns.”

— Walker Percy

10. “We love those who know the worst of us and don’t turn their face away.”

— Walker Percy

11. “Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.”

— Walker Percy

12. “I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all.”

— Walker Percy

13. “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 an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.”

— Walker Percy

14. “Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.”

— Walker Percy

15. “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.”

— Walker Percy

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

— Walker Percy

17. “A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.”

— Walker Percy

18. “Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

— Walker Percy

19. “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.”

— Walker Percy

20. “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 affair?”

— Walker Percy

21. “A note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they will often tell you not only what is wrong with them but also what is wrong with you.”

— Walker Percy

22. “Dear Mr. Fontenot: Glancing over your portfolio, it struck me that you are not in the best position to take advantage of the dawning age of missiles...”

— Walker Percy

23. “Consider to what extent an “antique” is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self –.”

— Walker Percy

24. “Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?”

— Walker Percy

25. “I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”

— Walker Percy

26. “Losing hope is not so bad. There’s something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.”

— Walker Percy

27. “Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.”

— Walker Percy

28. “I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That’s despair?”

— Walker Percy

29. “Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.”

— Walker Percy

30. “Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?”

— Walker Percy

31. “I couldn’t stand it. I still can’t stand it. I can’t stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.”

— Walker Percy

32. “Peace is only better than war when it’s not hell too. War being hell makes sense.”

— Walker Percy

33. “Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?”

— Walker Percy

34. “In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.”

— Walker Percy

35. “In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.”

— Walker Percy

36. “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 of drinks and kisses, a good little car and a warm deep thigh.”

— Walker Percy

37. “They all think any minute I’m going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I’m as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself – ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.”

— Walker Percy

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

— Walker Percy

39. “Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.”

— Walker Percy

40. “Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.”

— Walker Percy

41. “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 death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.”

— Walker Percy

42. “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...”

— Walker Percy

43. “Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.”

— Walker Percy

44. “If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I’d take the search.”

— Walker Percy

45. “My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.”

— Walker Percy

46. “One can sniff the ozone from the pine trees, visit the local bars, eat crawfish, and drink Dixie beer and feel as good as it is possible to feel in this awfully interesting century. And now and then, drive across the lake to New Orleans, still an entrancing city, eat trout amandine at Galatoire’s, drive home to my pleasant, uninteresting place, try to figure out how the world got into such a fix, shrug, take a drink, and listen to the frogs tune up.”

— Walker Percy

47. “The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.”

— Walker Percy

48. “Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.”

— Walker Percy

49. “There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.”

— Walker Percy

50. “Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.”

— Walker Percy