Max Monahan

“Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“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 . . .”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose