02c. 1953 ADThe difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to.Walker Percy / quote ↗
03c. 1953 ADIf 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.Walker Percy / quote ↗
04c. 1953 ADLord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.Walker Percy / quote ↗
05c. 1953 ADWhenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.Walker Percy / quote ↗
06c. 1953 ADWhy did God make women so beautiful and man with such a loving heart?Walker Percy / quote ↗
07c. 1953 ADMy laps-meter, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.Walker Percy / quote ↗
08c. 1953 ADSuch terms as 'diagnosis' and 'pathology' are of course used analogically here, but I am using the word 'science' deliberate and unequivocally in its original and broad sense of discovery and knowing, rather than its conventional sense of isolating the secondary causes of natural phenomena. For if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad; a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong.Walker Percy / quote ↗
09c. 1953 ADLast summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French and Spanish two hundred years ago and the Yankees one hundred years ago. 1948. What a faroff time.Walker Percy / quote ↗
10c. 1953 ADFiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.Walker Percy / quote ↗
11c. 1953 ADLonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you.Walker Percy / quote ↗
12c. 1953 ADPeople who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.Walker Percy / quote ↗
13c. 1953 ADEvery place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff - tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets - in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone.Walker Percy / quote ↗
14c. 1953 ADThis Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.Walker Percy / quote ↗
15c. 1953 ADLost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help BookorHow you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist ChristiansorWhy is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangestorWhy is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your lifeWalker Percy / quote ↗
16c. 1953 ADWhy do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor? The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.Walker Percy / quote ↗
17c. 1953 ADPolarities of the 'authentic' vs. the 'inauthentic' are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but rather have to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience.Walker Percy / quote ↗
18c. 1953 ADIn this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.Walker Percy / quote ↗
19c. 1953 ADJust because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn't mean that God does not exist.Walker Percy / quote ↗
20c. 1953 ADIt's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.Walker Percy / quote ↗
21c. 1953 AD...this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes.Walker Percy / quote ↗
22c. 1953 ADHow did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?Walker Percy / quote ↗
23c. 1953 AD....With pulleys and ropes and time to plan one could move anything. Now that she thought of it, why couldn’t anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time.Walker Percy / quote ↗
24c. 1953 ADWhat is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.Walker Percy / quote ↗
