I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they’re better than other people. You’re damn right we’re better. We’re better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. . . .we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we’ll look them in the eye without apology.
—Walker Percy
Topics: Racism
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
—Walker Percy
Topics: Discovery
What she didn’t understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.
—Walker Percy
Topics: Spirituality
You can get all A’s and still flunk life.
—Walker Percy
Topics: How to Live
What needs to be discharged is the intolerable tenderness of the The Past past gone and grieved over and never made sense of. Music ransoms us from the past, declares an amnesty, brackets and sets aside the old puzzles. Start a new life, get a girl, look into her shadowy eyes, smile. Fix me a toddy, Lola, and we’ll sit on the gallery of Tara and you play a tune and we’ll watch evening fall and lightning bugs wink in the purple meadow.
—Walker Percy
Topics: Music
Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
—Walker Percy
Topics: Grieving, Grief
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.
—Walker Percy
Topics: Life and Living
You can get all A’s and flunk life.
—Walker Percy
Topics: Realism, Living
I don’t like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you’re described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.
—Walker Percy
Topics: Authors & Writing
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Thomas Wolfe American Novelist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- William Saroyan American Playwright, Novelist
- William Gaddis American Novelist
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Ellery Queen American Crime Fiction Authors
- Lloyd Alexander American Writer
- Lionel Trilling American Critic
- Sigrid Undset Norwegian Novelist
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