I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,
He was singing a hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn.
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christiani...
This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.
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...
The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with re...
Nothing is like it used to be, lady, he said. The world is almost rotten.
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...
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...
Remember what you won't get if you don't mind, her grandfather remarked.
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.
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...
Most things are beyond me, Block said. I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood,
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.
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
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...
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint...
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...