Walker Percy was an American writer and philosopher. He was known for writing novels that explored the existential concerns of his characters. He was awarded the National Book Award in 1987 for his novel The Moviegoer.
What is the most famous quote by Walker Percy ?
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
— Walker Percy
What can you learn from Walker Percy (Life Lessons)
- Walker Percy emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and understanding the human condition in order to lead a meaningful life. He encourages us to be mindful of our inner dialogue, to question our beliefs and assumptions, and to be open to the possibilities of life.
- Walker Percy emphasizes the importance of maintaining a sense of humor, even when life is difficult, as it can help us to cope with difficult situations and to find joy in our lives.
- Walker Percy encourages us to be open to the unknown and to embrace the uncertainty of life, as it can lead to new opportunities and experiences that can enrich our lives.
The most viral Walker Percy quotes that will be huge advantage for your personal development
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various Walker Percy inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Walker Percy.
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
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.
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.
Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
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.
Introspective quotes by Walker Percy
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.
Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.
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.
There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
A good title should be like a good metaphor.
It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth.
Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.
Quotations by Walker Percy that are poignant and quirky
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
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.
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.
Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.
If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.
[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.
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.
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.
Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.
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.
Joy and sadness come by turns.
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.
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.
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.
In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.
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.
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
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.
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.
Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.
The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?
I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.
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.
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.