Quotes from Walker Percy

Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.

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

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.

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.

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

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

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

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

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

Where there is chance of gain, there is also chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise.

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.

Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth. Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.

Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

Losing hope is not so bad. There's something worse: losing hope and hiding it from yourself.

Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge.

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

Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.

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

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

We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.

We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away.

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

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

But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.