Stephanie Loomis

“I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually—like this today. The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal

“The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. The Catholic fiction writer is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Historian John Howe summed up Adams’s feelings on the subject. “Parties accentuated the struggle for political spoils and made personal ambition rather than social virtue the touchstone of political success. Party conflict, by exciting passions and clouding reason, corrupted elections more quickly than anything.”
― Marianne Holdzkom, Remembering John Adams: The Second President in History, Memory and Popular Culture

“When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, seta against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this—and out of nothing—can still count the hairs of my head.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Irrational Season