Walker Percy citations

“Il faut être humain pour être calculateur.”

“J'ai découvert que la plupart des gens n'ont personne à qui parler, personne, j'entends, qui veuille vraiment écouter. Quand un homme se rend enfin compte que vous êtes sincèrement désireux de l'entendre parler de ses affaires, l'expression qui envahit son visage est quelque chose d'extraordinaire à observer.”

“La quête, c'est ce que n'importe lequel d'entre nous entreprendrait s'il n'était pas absorbé par la quotidienneté de sa vie.”

“Dans ce monde, les bons sont voués à la défaite.”

“Mais la jalousie n'est pas seulement la peine que l'on a devant le bonheur d'un autre; c'est aussi la joie que l'on a devant son malheur.”

“Le suicide est la seule chose qui me garde en vie. Quand tout s'écroule autour de moi, tout ce que j'ai à faire c'est d'envisager le suicide et en deux secondes je suis aussi gaie qu'un simple d'esprit. Mais si je ne pouvais pas me tuer, — alors oui, je le ferais.”

“Car l'argent est une grande joie.”

“Rester éveillé est une espèce de maladie où l'on est à jamais protégé du sommeil par une vigilance tatillonne et nauséeuse.”

“To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

“Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.”

“Beauty is a whore.”

“Good-looking and amiable as he was, however, he did not strike one as remarkable. People usually told him the same joke two or three times.”

“You can get all A's and still flunk life.”

“Why did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?”

“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”

“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.”

“You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

“Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.”

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

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

“I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?”

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

“Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.”

“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives…”

“Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.”

“Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.”

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

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

“My aunt is convinced I have a "flair for research." This is not true. If I had a flair for research, I would be doing research. Actually I'm not very smart. My grades were average. My mother and my aunt think I am smart because I am quiet and absent-minded–and because my father and grandfather were smart. They think I was meant to do research because I am not fit to do anything else–I am a genius whom ordinary professions can't satisfy.”

“To tell the absolute truth, I’ve always been slightly embarrassed by Walter’s company. Whenever I’m with him, I feel the stretch of the old tightrope, the necessity of living up to the friendship of friendships, of cultivating an intimacy beyond words. The fact is that we have little to say to each other. There is only this thick sympathetic silence between us. We are comrades, true, but somewhat embarrassed comrades. It is probably my fault. For years now I have had no friends. I spend my entire time working, making money, going to movies and seeking the company of women.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn't. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, couldn't, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro.”

“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.”

“Once again he began to feel bad in the best of environments. And he noticed that other people did too. So bad did they feel, in fact, that it took the worst of news to cheer them up. On the finest mornings he noticed that people in the subway looked awful until they opened their newspapers and read of some airliner crashing and killing all hundred and seven passengers. Where there had been misery in their happiness, now as they shook their heads dolefully at the tragedy they became happy in their misery.”

“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…”

“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.”