Quotes from Walker Percy

He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies.

If Darwin was right, asked Wallace, why does the Tierra del Fuegan possess a brain not discernibly different from, say, Einstein's or Beethoven's, which he does not need?

Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations.

Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.

All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life.

The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.

A sharp character—no youth as I feared—a Faubourg Marigny type, Mediterranean, big-nosed, lumpy-jawed, a single stitched-in wrinkle over his eyebrows from just above which there springs up a great pompadour of wiry bronze hair. His face aches with it. He has no use for me at all.

When these long telephone silences come, it is a sure sign that love is over.

kids now don't have sense enough to know what they don't know.

do believe the South has produced more high-minded women, women of universal sentiments, than any other section of the country except possibly New England in the last century.

Students are a shaky dogmatic lot. And the "freer" they are, the more dogmatic. At heart they're totalitarians: they want either total dogmatic freedom or total dogmatic unfreedom, and the one thing that makes them unhappy is something in between.

Here was an oddity: that in the latter days when laymen owned everything they didn't care much for anything, yet some priests who owned little or nothing developed ferocious attachments for ordinary objects—I once knew a monk who owned nothing, had given it all away for Christ, yet coveted the monastery typewriter with a jealous love, flew into rages when another monk touched it.

own death is what you really love and won't be happy till you have, what then? Then we'll know, won't we?

Genius lies not in making the great discoveries, but in seeing the connections between the smaller ones...

The name of the enemy is death, he said, grinning and shoving his hands in his pockets. Not the death of dying but the living death. The

It is hardly surprising, then, that the evangel, the Gospel report of a single historical event—even though this event may be read by Christians as the single most important occurrence, the very watershed, of all history—should be seen by a certain set of the academic mind as exemplary; that is, as an instance of such-and-such recurring human proclivity for attributing divine manifestations to particular historical events.

For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

Cassirer asks the question, How can a sensory content become the vehicle of meaning?

Happy is the man who can do science at midnight, of a Tuesday, in the fall, free of ghosts, exorcised by love and music of all past Octobers.

We shake hands and part good comrades. But I have to get out of here, good fellows or no good fellows. Too much fellow feeling makes me nervous, to tell the truth.

It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the forms of beasts.

He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to the movies.

In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death.

Just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn't mean that God does not exist.