Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.
Unadaptability is often a virtue.
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.
When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.
There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.
If you’re a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.
Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.
Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.
Christianity is a strangely cheery religion.
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don’t know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don’t suppose I would write the story.
I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.
Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.
The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.