Walker Percy (1916 – 1990)
American Southern author whose interests included philosophy and semiotics.
Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don't like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and take up with the wrong people.
Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?
Is it possible that a theory of man is nothing more nor less than a theory of the speaking creatures?
I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.
She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.
As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free. (2.12)