Walker Percy

Ideas From a Great American Novelist and Philosopher

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creature?

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Earthlings seem to spend most of their time trafficking in one kind of symbol or another, while the other creatures of earth say not a word.

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and take up with the wrong people.

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-hanuted death-dealing Western world...

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Life is a mystery, love is a delight.

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Why is it that no other species but man gets bored?

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Why has man entered on an orgy of war in the very century when he had hoped to see the dawn of universal peace and brotherhood?

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

How indeed is one to live in this peculiar time and history and on ordinary Wednesday afternoons?

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

What interests me as a novelist is not the malevolence of man—so what else is new?—but his looniness.

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair.

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Do you understand sexuality? Or are you more confused about sexuality than any other phenomenon in the Cosmos?

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Sex is not a category at all. It is not merely an item on a list of human needs...but is rather a unique ecstasy, ek-stasis.

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Western man is promiscuous because there has occurred a displacement of the real...The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded.

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Suppose the erotic is the last and best recourse of the stranded self...what if then even the erotic becomes devalued? What then?

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

Walker Percy Weekend -- it's on! May 9-11, 2014, in St. Francisville, La. Mark your calendars: http://t.co/zqQ4epNZ8e

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

A cat has no myths and names no real or imaginary beings. It responds to the Cosmos exactly as it has learned or been programmed to respond.

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

Jews wait for The Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him. #loveintheruins

[Walker Percy @WalkerPercyTalk]

If the sexual drive is but one of several biological needs, why are we living in the most eroticized society in history?