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Walker Percy Quotes (1916-1990)
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About Walker Percy
Walker Percy (May 28 1916 – May 10 1990) was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful Walker Percy quotes.
“You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.”
“The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.”
“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”
“What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.”
“I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free. (2.12).”
“A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new.”
“As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.”
“Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it.”
“Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos — novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes — you are beyond doubt the strangest ...”
“She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.”
“There is no fashion so absurd, even grotesque, that it cannot be adopted, given two things: the authority of the fashion-setter (Dior, Jackie Onassis) and the vacuity or noughtness of the consumer.”
“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?”
“It was no more nor less than true. You do things by doing things, not by not doing them. No more crazy upsidedownness, he resolved. Good was better than bad. Good environments are better than bad environments.”
“He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.”
“In all honesty it was easier to believe it in cool Long Island for its very outrageousness where nobody believed anything very seriously than in hot Carolina where everybody was a Christian and found unbelief unbelievable.”
“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.”
“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.”
“For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.”
“Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place...there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. (4.3).”
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Walker Percy on Singularity
“Where does one start with a theory of man if the theory of man as an organism in an environment doesn't work and all the attributes of man which were accepted in the old modern age are now called into question: his soul, mind, freedom, will, Godlikeness? There is only one place to start: the place where man's singularity is there for all to see and cannot be called into question, even in a new age in which everything else is in dispute. That singularity is language...”
About Walker Percy
Walker Percy (May 28 1916 – May 10 1990) was an American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics.