She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, ‘I ain’t got any tattoo on my back.’ ‘What you got on it?’ the girl said. ‘My shirt,’ Parker said. ‘Haw.’ ‘Haw, haw,’ the girl said politely.
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.
Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn’t stifle enough of them.
To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.
Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual.
This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.
What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.
He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn’t kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up. He stepped down and greeted her.
As was usual with him, he began with the least important thing and worked around and in toward the center where the meaning was.
I believe firmly in mystery and manners.
The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art.
Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.
The formality that is left in the South now is quite dead and done for of course.
He groaned to see that she was off on that topic. She rolled into it every few days like a train on an open track. He knew every stop, every junction, every swamp along the way, and knew the exact point at which her conclusion would roll majestically into the station.
Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.
Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.