Love Quote by Walker Percy

Percy’s line is a quiet rebuke to the glossy version of intimacy Americans are trained to sell: improved, curated, eternally presentable. The hook is in “the worst of us,” a phrase that refuses the comforting fiction that love is mainly about celebrating the best. Percy, a Catholic novelist obsessed with modern alienation and self-deception, aims the sentence at the gap between how we perform personhood and how we actually live it. The “worst” isn’t just sin in the Sunday-school sense; it’s pettiness, boredom, cruelty, cowardice, the interior mess you can’t rebrand with a new job title or a better body.

The subtext turns on knowledge. “Those who know” implies exposure, time, proximity. Love here isn’t sparked by mystery but tested by disclosure. That’s a reversal of the romantic script where concealment keeps desire alive. Percy suggests the deeper risk: being fully seen and found ordinary, or worse, repellent. The reward isn’t admiration; it’s non-abandonment.

“Don’t turn their faces away” is doing heavy work. It’s not merely “stay” but “stay looking,” a visceral image of shame and the dread of moral disgust. Turning away is what polite society does when confronted with the unmarketable human. Percy frames love as an act of attention under pressure: the refusal to flinch.

In Percy’s mid-century South, amid rising consumer optimism and the loneliness of suburban life, this reads like an antidote to the era’s bright surfaces. It’s also a criterion: the people we “love” most are often the ones who give us the rarest gift in a status-obsessed culture, the permission to stop acting.