Walker Percy
Walker Percy
Walker Percy, Obl.S.B.was an American author from Covington, Louisiana, whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is known for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans, Louisiana, the first of which, The Moviegoer, won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 May 1916
CountryUnited States of America
Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls.
You can get all A's and still flunk life.
Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.
Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.
Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?
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.
Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.
You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their face away.
Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.