Walker Percy Quotes

I'm most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.

I lived in a state of rage from 12 to 20. Until college, I was beyond an outsider. I was a voyeur of life.

Earthlings are confused, insecure. And some Earthlings have no heritage: that's what leads them to kill each other and rob 7-11 stores.

When my husband died in 2006, I didn't want to be Mitzi Gaynor anymore.

One of my problems is I am getting so mature that I have to pick up a TV and toss it through the coffee table just to remind people of who I am. I want to go ranting and screaming into the grave.

You lose yourself when you first become a mum. It's easy to let yourself go.

I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.

After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

I don't recognize myself. I don't know who I am anymore." And it's all fun and games until someone loses an I.

That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.

Has there ever been an age so rife with neurotic sensibility, with that state of near shudders, or near hysteria, or near nausea, much of it induced by trifles, which used to belong to people who were at once ill-adjusted and over-civilized?

I just want my name back so my life can go back to chaotic and weird instead of chaotic and desperate.

Once you don't have freedom and you're obliged to do many things you don't want, and it becomes a routine, then your identity is at stake because you can feel that you are not anymore yourself, that you are what they want you to be - and you can lose yourself.

And you can tell that Britney Spears is struggling with who she is. I think she has a team of agents and managers who are saying, yes, push the envelope, kiss Madonna, take off all your clothes. And she’s doing that because she doesn’t want to sacrifice this enormous platform that she’s built. But at the same time, she is sacrificing herself and you can see that in her eyes when she talks.

Time is the enemy of identity

The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

My life would be constrained by the horror and fierce rage that my appearance inspired, but I would know peace as well as fear, tenderness as well as brutality, and even love in a time of cruelty.

I've known both misery and happiness, lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me. And I have felt like a wayfarer on an alien planet at times - walking, running, wondering about what brought me to this particular place, and why. But once I was here the dreams started moving in, and I went about devouring them as they devoured me.

Sport that consumed me for over two decades . . . is now gone. Now it's just me. No pressure, no expectations, no need to be fast, good, strong or to even improve. Yet I can't let go of this idea that I always need to be more than I am. And it is eating me alive.

I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.

Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.

Not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker).

You seek identity in the midst of indistinguishab le chaos, in sprawling nameless reality.