Walker Percy citations (64 citations, Page 2)

Chapter 2, section 2: The Self as Nought (II) http://books.google.com/books?id=tWZQPAoh3ZQC&q=%22There+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%22&pg=PA23#v=onepage.
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)

“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.”

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Walker Percy livre The Last Gentleman

The Last Gentleman (1966)

“What a man can be the next minute bears no relation to what he is or what he was the minute before.”

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Walker Percy livre The Last Gentleman

The Last Gentleman (1966)

“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.”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

“Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?”

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Walker Percy livre The Message in the Bottle

The Message in the Bottle (1975)

“Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it.”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

“The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people's live were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself? How did they manage to deceive themselves and even appear to live normally, work as usual, play golf, tell jokes, argue politics? Was he crazy or was it rather the case that other people went to any length to disguise from themselves the fact that their lives were farcical? He couldn't decide.”

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Walker Percy livre The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1980)

“Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be the moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx — my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me — we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!).”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

“What struck him was not sadness or remorse or pity but the wonder of it. How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life has passed like a dream? They looked at teach other curiously and wondered how they could have missed each other, lived in the same house all those years and passed in the hall like ghosts.”

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Walker Percy livre The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1980)

“She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

1.7
The Moviegoer (1961)

“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?”

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Walker Percy

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)

“A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new.”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

“I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

2.12
The Moviegoer (1961)

“As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

“Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don't like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and take up with the wrong people.”

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Walker Percy livre The Last Gentleman

The Last Gentleman (1966)

“You don't ever really learn anything you didn't know when you were thirteen.”

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Walker Percy livre The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1980)

“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?”

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Walker Percy

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983)

“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

“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.”

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Walker Percy livre The Last Gentleman

The Last Gentleman (1966)

“To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

“Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer (1961)

“My aunt is convinced I have a "flair for research."”

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Walker Percy livre The Moviegoer

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.
The Moviegoer (1961)