Sublime

No one in our town came off looking great. “This is the great tragedy of California,” he wrote in the last paragraph, “for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death—the greatest leisure of all.”

She had no sense of proportion, none whatever—and wasn’t that exactly the thing one looked for in a woman?

It is what is feared by the rabbit that cannot ultimately escape the hounds.

As you grow older, you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”

For Flannery O’Connor, ‘the teacher’s work should be largely negative . . . We can learn how not to write.’ But it would be terrible to discourage novice writers by pointing out their failings in public.

The terror and consternation of the Presidential couple may be imagined by anyone who has ever loved a child, and suffered that dread intimation common to all parents, that Fate may not hold that life in as high a regard, and may dispose of it at will.

Perhaps Fry actually was, as Mary McCarthy wrote, “a perfect madman.” To perceive the blinding irrational vastness of absolute evil, one almost needs to be mad.