That's not the way he told it, Tarwater said. He said that when the schoolteacher was seven years old, he had good sense but later it dried up. His daddy was an ass and not fit to raise him and his mo...
Nothing is like it used to be, lady, he said. The world is almost rotten.
Most things are beyond me, Block said. I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood,
It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an ins...
I have heard people say that the short story was one of the most difficult literary forms, and I've always tried to decide why people feel this way about what seems to me to be one of the most natural...
He was singing a hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn.
The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must rep...
He was bald-headed except for a little fringe of rust-colored hair and his face was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like them with ruts and gullys.
There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.
Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to...
I never argue, Jacobs said. That’s because you don’t know this kind of ignorance, Rayber explained. You’ve never experienced it. Jacobs snorted. Oh yes I have, he said. What happened? I never argue. B...
The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if...
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessar...
Silly that a grocery should depress one—nothing in it but trifling domestic doings—women buying beans—riding children in those grocery go-carts—higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less of squa...
She was a talker, wasn't she? Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. She would of been a good woman, The Misfit said, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life....
She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it.
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint...
Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn’t conceive of any other condition.
Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead, The Misfit continued, and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thro...
It is when the individual's faith is weak, not strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it...