You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.
...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.
A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.
Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.
It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth
Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
A God you understood would be less than yourself.
Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax 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.
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.
Unadaptability is often a virtue.
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.
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