Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries. Walker Percy More Quotes by Walker Percy More Quotes From Walker Percy Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life? Walker Percy rest-of-your-life wells miracle Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls. Walker Percy balls united-states people Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him. Walker Percy hymns catholic waiting Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck-- people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways. Walker Percy real gone people If 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 twenties artist suicide Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust. Walker Percy cake pieces alcohol 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. Walker Percy dog sleep men Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself. Walker Percy boredom self blessing The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past. Walker Percy time lying past Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge. Walker Percy ignorance appearance ifs My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted. Walker Percy adolescence failing mother In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated. Walker Percy defeated goodness world Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere. Walker Percy old-neighborhood emptiness shows 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? Walker Percy eye long past I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age. Walker Percy tolerate age way There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you. Walker Percy pain men looks Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly? Walker Percy may discovery way The conviction: I will not tolerate this age. The freedom: the freedom to act on my conviction. And I will act. No one else has both the conviction and the freedom. Many agree with me, have the conviction, but will not act. Some act, assassinate, bomb, burn, etc., but they are the crazies. Crazy acts by crazy people. But what if one, sober, reasonable, and honorable man should act, and act with perfect sobriety, reason, and honor? Then you have the beginning of a new age. We shall start a new order of things. Walker Percy crazy men order Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature? Walker Percy gaps animal men One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all. Walker Percy cosmos peculiar self
