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“Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.”

“The life you save may very well be your own.”

“Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.”

“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.”

“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”

“Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.”

“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”

“Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.

Her response was, “If it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.”

“When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.”

“The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.”

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

“Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.”

“Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.”

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”

“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”

“… free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.”

“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.”

“Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.”

“Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.”

“He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.”

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.”