Quotes from The Last Gentleman

Walker Percy ·  416 pages

Rating: (2K votes)


“Like many young men in the South, he had trouble ruling out the possible. They are not like an immigrant's son in Passaic who desires to become a dentist and that is that. Southerners have trouble ruling out the possible. What happens to a... man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman


“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 takes up with the wrong people.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman


“But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman


“The happiness of the South was very formidable. It was an almost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anything else. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the Constitution, and they were getting rich in the bargain. They had the best of victory and defeat. Their happiness was aggressive and irresistible.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman


“For example, she did not mind at all if Christendom should be done for, stove in, kaput, screwed up once and all. She did not mind that the Christers were like everybody else, if not worse.”
― Walker Percy, quote from The Last Gentleman



About the author

Walker Percy
Born place: in Birmingham, Alabama, The United States
Born date May 28, 1916
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“A minute teaches me sixty different ways to think about you.”
― Faraaz Kazi, quote from Truly, Madly, Deeply


“A pretty young Hebrew woman spoke so little English I could not get her story except as told by the nurses. They said her name is Sarah Fishbaum, and that her husband put her in the asylum because she had a fondness for other men than himself.”
― Nellie Bly, quote from Ten Days in a Mad-House


“¿No deberíamos considerar un héroe a alguien que logra crear un mundo perfecto, aunque tan solo sea por un instante y para un solo hombre?”
― Félix J. Palma, quote from The Map of the Sky


“Baby girl, five minutes alone with me and you're gonna be begging me to taste your pie.”
― Carmen Jenner, quote from Welcome to Sugartown


“Dogrusun. Haklisin Cabbar. Ama gel bana sor. Içerime sor. Yüregimi iki el tutmus sik babam sik ediyor. Edemem. Hatçeyi görmeden edemem. Görmezsem ölürüm. Öyle ölcegime, böyle ölüyüm..”
― Yaşar Kemal, quote from Memed, My Hawk


Interesting books

Collected Poems
(7.7K)
Collected Poems
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
(26.2K)
I Am Half-Sick of Sh...
by Alan Bradley
The Last Dragonslayer
(16.8K)
The Last Dragonslaye...
by Jasper Fforde
Thousand Cranes
(6.8K)
Thousand Cranes
by Yasunari Kawabata
The Murder on the Links
(27.6K)
The Murder on the Li...
by Agatha Christie
Speaking from Among the Bones
(27K)
Speaking from Among...
by Alan Bradley

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.