Signposts in a Strange Land Quotes

“A writer worth his salt is probably better off in an adversarial relation with the U.S. Senate.”
― Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

“This decline of literacy is accompanied by a rise in philistinism in America: a preference for the skillfully marketed and packaged product for the consumption of the mass man—the Top Ten on TV, NFL telecasts with the quite well-done Miller Lite and Mean Joe Green commercials—plus a few big commercial novels, whether the Harold Robbins novel in which sex figures second only to money, the Barbara Cartland novel in which sex becomes something called romance, or the Judy Blume novel in which teenagers are introduced to sex like Tarzan and Jane.”
― Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

“a great culture is recognizable through its artists and its saints and not by its GNP.”
― Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

“One can sniff the ozone from the pine trees, visit the local bars, eat crawfish, and drink Dixie beer and feel as good as it is possible to feel in this awfully interesting century. And now and then, drive across the lake to New Orleans, still an entrancing city, eat trout amandine at Galatoire’s, drive home to my pleasant, uninteresting place, try to figure out how the world got into such a fix, shrug, take a drink, and listen to the frogs tune up.”
― Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

“New Orleans may be too seductive for a writer.”
― Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

“A minor cultural note: In my opinion, local Yankee racists are worse than Southern racists; they don’t even like Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas. One can only wonder how Abraham Lincoln ever talked these people into fighting a war to free slaves. And the main difference between local country-clubbers (affluent, often Midwestern) and the local Klan (poor, Southern) is that the former tolerate Jews and Catholics, probably because there are so few Jews and the Catholics are generally as conservative as country-club WASPs.”
― Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

“I prefer to live in the South but on my own terms. It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as not to succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South.”
― Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

“The moderate is aware both of the enormous difficulty of the problem and of the pressing need to do something about it. But the greatest need, to him, is the exercise of responsibility.”
― Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

“It is hardly surprising, then, that the evangel, the Gospel report of a single historical event—even though this event may be read by Christians as the single most important occurrence, the very watershed, of all history—should be seen by a certain set of the academic mind as exemplary; that is, as an instance of such-and-such recurring human proclivity for attributing divine manifestations to particular historical events.”
― Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays