Walker Percy
One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.Collection: Self
Not to be onto something is to be in despair.Collection: Despair
It is not merely the truth of science that makes it beautiful, but its simplicity.Collection: Beautiful
[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.Collection: Art
Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Helping Others
For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.Collection: Angel
Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?Collection: Beautiful
Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Past
Ooooh," Kate groans, Kate herself now. "I'm so afraid." "I know." "What am I going to do?" "You mean right now?" "Yes." "We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home." "Is everything going to be all right?" "Yes." "Tell me. Say it." "Everything is going to be all right.Collection: Coffee
What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the past, the past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Sing a new song. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile.Collection: Girl
Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.Collection: Life Is
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.Collection: People
I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.Collection: Sex
Joy and sadness come by turns.Collection: Sadness
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.Collection: Men
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.Collection: Mother
The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning: The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest. The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.Collection: Suicide
The conviction: I will not tolerate this age. The freedom: the freedom to act on my conviction. And I will act. No one else has both the conviction and the freedom. Many agree with me, have the conviction, but will not act. Some act, assassinate, bomb, burn, etc., but they are the crazies. Crazy acts by crazy people. But what if one, sober, reasonable, and honorable man should act, and act with perfect sobriety, reason, and honor? Then you have the beginning of a new age. We shall start a new order of things.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: Dog
What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.Collection: Clothes
I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.Collection: Age
Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.Collection: Beats
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: People
Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.Collection: Hymns
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.Collection: Old Neighborhood
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.Collection: Sadness
The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.Collection: Endure
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.Collection: Fun
In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.Collection: World
It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.Collection: People
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.Collection: Ordinary
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?Collection: Eye
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.Collection: Sky
There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.Collection: Pain
A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.Collection: Writing
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.Collection: Fiction
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.Collection: Way