Quotes from Walker Percy

I came to myself, saw myself as itself and the world for what it is, and began to love life. Hm, better stop the bleeding in that case. After all, why not live? Bad as things are still when all is said and done, one can sit on a doorstep in the winter sunlight and watch sparrows kick leaves.

On those days or mornings when you feel worst, when you think everything is hopeless, that nothing will happen--sometimes the best things happen.

It's an interesting age you will live in — though I can't say I'm sorry to miss it. But it should be quite a sight, the going under of the evening land. That's us all right. And I can tell you, my young friend, it is evening. It is very late.

Now I have undertaken a different kind of search, a horizontal search. As a consequence, what takes place in my room is less important. What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighbourhood. Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.

Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears. But surely it is fair to say that when a man becomes depressed, falls down in a sand trap, and decides to shoot himself, something has gone wrong with the man, not the world.

For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen. The present is surrendered to the past and the future.

Beyond, a rise of sand and saw grass is creased by a rivulet of clear water in which swim blue crabs and cat-eye snails. Over the hillock lies the open sea. The difference is very great: first, this sleazy backwater, then the great blue ocean. The beach is clean and a big surf is rolling in; the water in the middle distance is green and lathered. You come over the hillock and your heart lifts up; your old sad music comes into the major.

Catastrophe as Catalyst in the Ontology of Joy, or Hurricane Parties on the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Camille: An In-depth Study of Eleven Victims Who Elected to Stay Compared with Eleven Random Control Subjects Who Elected to Leave"?

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

Question: During the week following Pearl Harbor, the incidence of suicide declined dramatically across the nation. Was this decline a consequence of (1) A rise in patriotic fervor and a sense of purpose? (2) A new sense of interest (e.g., something, even war, is better than nothing. Peace in the 1930s was like nothing)?

Now that she thought of it, why couldn't anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time?

It was not the prospect of the Last Day which depressed him but rather the prospect of living through an ordinary Wednesday morning.

Gentilly is swept fitfully by desire and by an east wind from the burning swamps at Chef Menteur.

Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants?

Another evidence of my Jewishness: the other day a sociologist reported that a significantly large percentage of solitary moviegoers are Jews.

By the very cogent anthropology of Judeo-Christianity, whether or not one agreed with it, human existence was by no means to be understood as the transaction of a higher organism satisfying this or that need from its environment, by being "creative" or enjoying "meaningful relationships," but as the journey of a wayfarer along life's way. The

Whenever I feel myself sinking into a deep sleep, something always recalls me: "Not so fast now. Suppose you should go to sleep and it should happen. What then?" Clearly nothing. Yet there I lie, wakeful and watchful as a sentry, ears tuned to the slightest noise.

A mare's tail of cirrus cloud stands in high from the Gulf.

A dying king, said Sir Thomas More, is apt to be wiser than a healthy king.

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.

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?

Nothing remains but desire, and desire comes howling down Elysian Fields like a mistral.

In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.