Walker Percy said this quote

“ Last 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. ”

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

~ Walker Percy

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 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

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

Lord, 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