Walker Percy Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

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

  Walker Percy

  Writing, Titles, Metaphor

  10 Copy quote

• It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.

  Walker Percy

  People, Roles, Steps

  Walker Percy (2011). “Lancelot”, p.71, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

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

  Walker Percy

  Sky, America, People

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer”, p.88, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Walker Percy

  Self, Peculiar, Cosmos

  Walker Percy (2011). “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book”, p.8, Open Road Media

  12 Copy quote

• Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

  Walker Percy

  Animal, Men, Gaps

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other”, p.7, Open Road Media

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Walker Percy

  Angel, Men, Self

  4 Copy quote

• A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.

  Walker Percy

  Fiction, Stories, Novel

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.77, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

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

  Walker Percy

  Way, Facts, Becoming

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Thanatos Syndrome”, p.6, Open Road Media

  8 Copy quote

• Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

  Walker Percy

  Class, Categories

  Walker Percy (2011). “Lancelot”, p.70, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?

  Walker Percy

  Discovery, May, Way

  Walker Percy (1988). “The moviegoer”

  10 Copy quote

• Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.

  Walker Percy

  Guarantees, Obnoxious, Uneducated

  Walker Percy (2011). “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book”, p.82, Open Road Media

  8 Copy quote

• Children notice things first, people later.

  Walker Percy

  Children, People, Firsts

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.38, Open Road Media

  8 Copy quote

• Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

  Walker Percy

  Despair

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer”, p.10, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

• Joy and sadness come by turns.

  Walker Percy

  Sadness, Joy, Turns

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer: A Novel”, p.84, Open Road Media

  6 Copy quote

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

  Walker Percy

  Beautiful, Science, Simplicity

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.101, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Suicide, Thinking, Opposites

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer”, p.84, Open Road Media

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Walker Percy

  Girl, Song, Eye

  Walker Percy (1978). “Love in the ruins: the adventures of a bad Catholic at a time near the end of the world”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Helping Others, Men, Brain

  6 Copy quote

• [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.

  Walker Percy

  Art, Communication, Feelings

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Walker Percy

  Girl, Summer, Lonely

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer”, p.8, Open Road Media

  8 Copy quote

• Why did God make woman so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?

  Walker Percy

  Beautiful, Heart, Men

  "Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World".

  4 Copy quote

• I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

  Walker Percy

  Sex, Writing, Thinking

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.94, Open Road Media

  5 Copy quote

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

  Walker Percy

  Hate, Hatred, Honest

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.77, Open Road Media

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Past, Order, Usual

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer”, p.37, Open Road Media

  6 Copy quote

• But there is much to be said for giving up ... grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable.

  Walker Percy

  Giving Up, Ambition, Ordinary

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer”, p.9, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

Page 3 of 4

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin