Walker Percy
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.Collection: Age
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.
We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away.
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.
Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
You live in a deranged age, more deranged than 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.Collection: Life
We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.Collection: Love
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 but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Fighting
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.Collection: Possibility
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.Collection: Faith
Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.Collection: Fiction
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.Collection: Loss
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.Collection: Discovery
Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?Collection: Real
Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.Collection: Ignorance
Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.Collection: Wander
If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.Collection: Knowing
I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?Collection: Beer
Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.Collection: Children
Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.Collection: Believe
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.Collection: Cake
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 realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.Collection: Time
The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.Collection: Dog
Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.Collection: Blessing
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.Collection: People
Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.Collection: Home
Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?Collection: Miracle
What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Kissing
But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.Collection: Giving Up
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.Collection: Suicide
Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.Collection: Son
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.Collection: Hatred
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.Collection: Desire
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.Collection: Uncles
Children notice things first, people later.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Memorable
I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.Collection: Eye
But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.Collection: Writing
Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Real
Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.Collection: Losing
Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.Collection: Lying
Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.Collection: War
Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?Collection: Class
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.Collection: Guarantees
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?Collection: Animal