Walker Percy Quotes - Page 2

Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

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.

Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?

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.

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.

Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.

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.

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.

What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.

I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.

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.

Consciously cultivate the ordinary.

Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.

Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.

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.

The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.

I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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