Walker Percy Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.

  Walker Percy

  Lying, Book, Human Condition

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays”, p.251, Open Road Media

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• 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

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• 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

  Real, People, Gone

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer: A Novel”, p.51, Open Road Media

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• Peace is only better than war when it's not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

  Walker Percy

  War, Politics, Hell

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

  Walker Percy

  Class, Categories

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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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”

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

  Walker Percy

  Despair

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

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• Joy and sadness come by turns.

  Walker Percy

  Sadness, Joy, Turns

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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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”

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• [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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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".

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

  Walker Percy

  Coffee, Home, Mean

  Walker Percy (2011). “The Moviegoer”, p.52, Open Road Media

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• Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.

  Walker Percy

  Heartbreak, Grief, Loss

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