That's One Sassy Lady

So Flannery O'Connor is an amazing writer. She was, rather, because she is presumably no longer writing, but is enjoying her heavenly reward, which, I suppose, might well involve writing. She is amazing not only for the quality of her diction and the deftness of her pen, but for the richness of her content, for the splendor of her imagination. No speaker of English should die without having read at least a story or two of hers. Here are some quotes from outside her corpus of fiction.

"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

(Dan Brown comes to mind... not you, roommie. The other "Dan Brown.")

"Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not."

How true. Atheists ignorantly think faith is a belief without experiential fact. It's almost the opposite; it is, having experienced a fact, clinging to it even when it no longer seems very believable. It's the same virtue that makes things like marriage possible. Marriage is the virtue, you might say, whereby one person, having seen the goodness in another, clings to that person even when he or she no longer seems very likeable.

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."

"When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock, to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures."