Walker Percy

"You can get all A's and still flunk life."

"The 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 fro…"

"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…"

"What struck him was not sadness or remorse or pity but the wonder of it. How can it be? How can it happen that one day you are young, you marry, and then another day you come to yourself and your life…"

"Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very…"

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life."

"Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less t…"

"Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place...there it is as big as lif…"