{"author":"Walker Percy","author_id":"Walker+Percy","total_quotes":36,"quotes":[{"text":"You can get all A's and still flunk life.","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["life"],"id":646,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"},{"text":"Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? And it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you.","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["communication","speech","words"],"id":36695,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"},{"text":"Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help BookorHow you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist ChristiansorWhy is it that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos - novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes - you are beyond doubt the strangestorWhy is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life.","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["cosmos","existence","self","self-help"],"id":44090,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"},{"text":"Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["fiction"],"id":75009,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"},{"text":"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.","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["history","time"],"id":75706,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"},{"text":"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?","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["eyes","finger","lion","perilous","planet"],"id":90296,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"},{"text":"You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["confusion","existentialism","philosophy"],"id":90352,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"},{"text":"Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff - tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets - in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone.","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["travel"],"id":105233,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"},{"text":"It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you--they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less--but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["home","homecoming","nostalgia","small-town"],"id":112377,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"},{"text":"People who are ordinarily understood to dislike each other or at least to be indifferent toward each other discover that they have much in common.","author":"Walker Percy","tags":["dislike","relationship"],"id":113778,"author_id":"Walker+Percy"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":36,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}