Some favorite lines from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer:

My mother and my aunt think I’m smart because I am quiet and absent-minded.

I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in.

“Don’t you feel obliged to use your brain and to make a contribution?”

“No’m.”

Goodness is destined to be defeated.

I will say yes even though I do not really know what she is talking about.

Our old friendship now itself falls victim to the grisly transmogrification by which she unfailingly turns everything she touches to horror.

There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time.

I have eaten nothing today.

She takes a great deal of trouble with me. I wish I were able to please her better.

The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.

I can see him, blundering through the patio furniture, the Junior Jets and the Lone Ranger pup tents, dragging his Saskatchewan sleeping bag like the corpse of his dead hope.

After she has gotten in, she makes it plain that MG or no MG there is to be no monkey business.

An amber droplet of Coca-Cola meanders along her thigh, touches a blond hair, distributes itself around the tiny fossa.

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.

Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other.

All the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

A rumble has commenced in my descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation.

The air is heavy and still. It is a time to be on guard.

Becoming aware of the abyss that yawned at her feet, she would a thousand times rather find herself in the middle of a no man’s land than at a party or a club.

Her eyes are pools of darkness. There is about her face the rapt almost ugly look of solitary people.

Couldn’t a person be miserable because he got one thing wrong and never learned otherwise?

Long ago I learned to be wary of her revelations.

But I know I am right or I would not feel so wonderful. She will not feel wonderful long. When the night falls away into gray distances, she will sink into herself.

Kate is herself now. “I’m so afraid. Is everything going to be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me. Say it.”

“Everything is going to be all right.”