Only art could make fiction beautiful; only reality could sustain such intense art.
Two things I can’t stand,” Haze said, “ – a man that ain’t true and one that mocks what is.
Lemme tell you something: there ain’t any place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man.” The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet’s head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree. He didn’t answer at once. He rolled himself.
I come a long way since I would believe anything. I come halfway around the world.
The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don’t hold nothing back.
Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look.
Fiction may deal with faith implicitly but explicitly it deals only with faith-in-a-person, or persons. What must be unquestionable is what is implicitly implied as the author’s attitude, and to do this the writer has to succeed in making the divinity of Christ seem consistent with the structure of all reality. This has to be got across implicitly in spite of a world that doesn’t feel it, in spite of characters who don’t live it. – Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being.
In spite of himself, Enoch couldn’t get over the expectation that the new jesus was going to do something for him in return for his services. This was the virtue of Hope, which was made up, in Enoch, of two parts suspicion and one part lust.
His home was to him home, workshop, church, as personal as the shell of a turtle and as necessary.
It’s no part of your job to think for the Lord,” his great-uncle said. “Judgment may rack your bones.
He don’t know it’s anything he can’t know,” the old man said. “That’s his trouble. He thinks if it’s something he can’t know then somebody smarter than him can tell him about it and he can know it just the same. And if you were to go there, the first thing he would do would be to test your head and tell you what you were thinking and howcome you were thinking it and what you ought to be thinking instead. And before long you wouldn’t belong to your self no more, you would belong to him.
If I even do get to be a fine writer it will not be because I am a fine writer, but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.
Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.
Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance that extended from his eyes to blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space.
And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said – without warning “Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!
I like his eyes,” she observed, “They don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep on looking.
Librarians are the last people you can trust about the inside of books.
It’s just like any other city and cities ain’t all that complicated.” But they were. New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next.
She was seeing that her father spent his last years with his own family and not in a decayed boarding house full of old women whose heads jiggled. She was doing her duty. She had brothers and sisters who were not.
The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them.