Top 100 Walker Percy Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.”

— Walker Percy

52. “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.”

— Walker Percy

53. “Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man, to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and a feeling of affection and freedom and justice. These words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus strike me as pretty good advice, for even the orneriest young scamp.”

— Walker Percy

54. “But if there’s nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.”

— Walker Percy

55. “Consciously cultivate the ordinary.”

— Walker Percy

56. “Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.”

— Walker Percy

57. “I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle.”

— Walker Percy

58. “Do you know what he told me after lying under a cliff for thirty six hours with two inches of his femur sticking out? He said: ‘Queenie, I think I’m going to pass out and before I do, I’m going to give you a piece of advice’ – God, I thought he was going to die and knew and was telling me what to do with his book – and he said quite solemnly: ‘Queenie, always stick to Bach and the early Italians’ – and passed out cold as a mackerel. And by God, it’s not bad advice.”

— Walker Percy

59. “Her bottom is so beautiful that once as she crossed the room to the cooler I felt my eyes smart with tears of gratitude.”

— Walker Percy

60. “This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.”

— Walker Percy

61. “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 the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.”

— Walker Percy

62. “Assume that you are quite right. You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth – and who are luckily exempt from depression – would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. 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.”

— Walker Percy

63. “Children notice things first, people later.”

— Walker Percy

64. “Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.”

— Walker Percy

65. “A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. 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

66. “Without faith, people perish, and they are perishing before our eyes.”

— Walker Percy

67. “I stood up. Can a man stand alone, naked, and at his ease, wrist flexed at his side like Michelangelo’s David, without assistance, without diversion, without drink, without friends, without a woman, in silence? Yes. It was possible to stand. Nothing happened. I listened. There was no sound: no boats on the river, no trucks on the road, not even cicadas. What if I didn’t listen to the news? I didn’t. Nothing happened. I realized I had been afraid of silence.”

— Walker Percy

68. “Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.”

— Walker Percy

69. “The real wonder is not that the Cosmos is now seen as wonderful but that it is not. Despite its inconceivable vastness, it is seen not as wonderful but as something that can be explained as a dyadic system.”

— Walker Percy

70. “If Darwin was right, asked Wallace, why does the Tierra del Fuegan possess a brain not discernibly different from, say, Einstein’s or Beethoven’s, which he does not need?”

— Walker Percy

71. “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 the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

— Walker Percy

72. “I prefer to live in the South but on my own terms. It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as not to succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South.”

— Walker Percy

73. “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 around the United States like billiard balls.”

— Walker Percy

74. “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 time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.”

— Walker Percy

75. “Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot. En masse they’re as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who’ll stoop to it. They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and old lies with all the insistence of self-discovery. Nothing is drearier than the ideology of students, left or right.”

— Walker Percy

76. “Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?”

— Walker Percy

77. “God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places.”

— Walker Percy

78. “Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff – tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets – in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone.”

— Walker Percy

79. “Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations.”

— Walker Percy

80. “At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.”

— Walker Percy

81. “I don’t like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you’re described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.”

— Walker Percy

82. “To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle.”

— Walker Percy

83. “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

84. “It has taken me all these years to make the simplest discovery: that I am surrounded by two classes of maniacs. The first are the believers, who think they know the reason why we find ourselves in this ludicrous predicament yet act for all the world as if they don’t. The second are the unbelievers, who don’t know the reason and don’t care if they don’t.”

— Walker Percy

85. “As a Bolling in Feliciana Parish, I became accustomed to sitting on the porch in the dark and talking of the size of the universe and the treachery of men; as a Smith on the Gulf Coast I have become accustomed to eating crabs and drinking beer under a hundred and fifty watt bulb – and one is as pleasant a way as the other in passing a summer night.”

— Walker Percy

86. “In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.”

— Walker Percy

87. “It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.”

— Walker Percy

88. “A sharp character – no youth as I feared – a Faubourg Marigny type, Mediterranean, big-nosed, lumpy-jawed, a single stitched-in wrinkle over his eyebrows from just above which there springs up a great pompadour of wiry bronze hair. His face aches with it. He has no use for me at all.”

— Walker Percy

89. “New Orleans may be too seductive for a writer.”

— Walker Percy

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

— Walker Percy

91. “I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink.”

— Walker Percy

92. “How strange to think that you cannot pass along the discovery.”

— Walker Percy

93. “The truth is I dislike cars. Whenever I drive a car, I have the feeling I have become invisible. People on the street cannot see you; they only watch your rear fender until it is out of their way.”

— Walker Percy

94. “Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.”

— Walker Percy

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

— Walker Percy

96. “Soap shining beauty.”

— Walker Percy

97. “I have nothing else to offer you but my own happiness. Please say that it, at least, measures up, that it is a proper sort of unhappiness.”

— Walker Percy

98. “Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck – people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell’s death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.”

— Walker Percy

99. “Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.”

— Walker Percy

100. “Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?”

— Walker Percy