Sparrow

“Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“In Surprised by Joy Lewis notes how his father, Albert, was fond of telling anecdotes about Sir John Mahaffy, anecdotes which Lewis later (at Oxford) found attached to Benjamin Jowett. This, alas, is the fate of any great figure: to serve as a convenient magnet for stories or quotations that other people want to perpetuate, however inaccurately.”
― Michael Ward

“Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.”
― Frederick Buechner

“I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word "good" so profoundly affirmed in my soul that I am amazed I should be allowed to witness such a thing. There may have been a more wonderful first moment "when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy," but for all I know to the contrary, they still do sing and shout, and they certainly might well. Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead