Walker Percy Quotes

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence

Behind my work was ambition, behind my love was personality, behind my purity was fear, behind my guidance the thirst for power. Now they are vanishing and I drift. I come, Mother, I come, in Thy warm bosom, floating wheresoever Thou takest me, in the voiceless, in the strange, in the wonderland, I come - a spectator, no more an actor.

I felt like I was literally losing myself as being the joyful, spiritual, passionate, exciting woman that I naturally had been.

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

My life is in denial. And when I die, baptized in eternal fire, I'll shed many tears.

I'm on the path to being someone I'm equally terrified by and obsessed with. My true self.

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

Since I’ve known you, you’ve been spinning and spinning and spinning into all these various personas, and none of this self-exploration and experimentation has given you a sense of peace. I’ve known you for six years, intimately for four, and I still have no idea who I’m in love with.

Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.

If you realize what the real problem is-losing yourself-you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside.

Nor from hell One step no more than from himself can fly By change of place.

A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.

I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my enquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, down throw and upheaval, and my effort is their self-expression.

I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops, in fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged; she belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.

I am a shark, Cassie," he says slowly, drawing the words out, as if he might be speaking to me for the last time. Looking into my eyes with tears in his, as if he's seeing me for the last time. "A shark who dreamed he was a man.

It is only in the depths of crisis and despair that the fear of losing one's personality breeds millennial hopes of rescue: otherwise, complacency prevails.

For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

There's still such chaos in me. Still so little firmly outlined. Just like my face: a formless mass that only takes on shape through the expression of the moment. The searching for our selves is the most agonizing

I feel, am mad as any writer must in one way be; why not make it real? I am too close to the bourgeois society of suburbia: too close to people I know I must sever my self from them, or be a part of their world: this half and half compromise is intolerable.

And ah for a man to arise in me, That the man I am may cease to be!

Man is dragged hither and thither, at one moment by the blind instincts of the forest, at the next by the strange intuitions of a higher self whose rationale he doubts and does not understand.

This story of loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.