168 Quotes by Walker Percy

I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.

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?

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.

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.

Do you know what he told me after lying under a cliff for thirty six hours with two inches of his femur sticking out? He said: 'Queenie, I think I'm going to pass out and before I do, I'm going to give you a piece of advice' - God, I thought he was going to die and knew and was telling me what to do with his book - and he said quite solemnly: 'Queenie, always stick to Bach and the early Italians' - and passed out cold as a mackerel. And by God, it's not bad advice.

People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.

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

At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal.