Sheri Joyce

“But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“In The Terrible Speed of Mercy, Jonathan Rogers’s wonderful biography of Flannery O’Connor, he writes about her willingness to tell the stories she was called to tell, even if it meant the critics and the audience sometimes missed her point entirely. She took a long view, and though it was painful, stayed true to her calling and trusted that it was God’s business what he did with her stories after they were written. She wrote, “God may use my work to save some people and to test the faith of others, but that’s His business and none of mine.”
― Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making

“Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“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. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose