168 Quotes by Walker Percy

I sometimes think novelists write about sex in order to avoid boring themselves to death.

[In art] you are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn't quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition.

Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.

The so-called sexual revolution is not, as advertised, a liberation of sexual behavior but rather its reversal. In former days, even under Victoria, sexual intercourse was the natural end and culmination of heterosexual relations. Now one begins with genital overtures instead of a handshake, then waits to see what will turn up (e.g., might become friends later). Like dogs greeting each other nose to tail and tail to nose.

Maybe there are times when an honest hatred serves us better than love corrupted by sentimentality, meretriciousness, sententiousness, cuteness.

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

If I had the choice of knowing the truth or searching for the truth, I'd take the search.

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.

Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.