The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
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.
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.
[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 . . .
I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.
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.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
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.
A God you understood would be less than yourself.
Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth
Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.
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.
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.
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.
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.
Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.
I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
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