Lovely Beasts

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I have tried imagining that the single peacock I see before me is the only one I have, but then one comes to join him, another flies off the roof, four or five crash out of the crepe-myrtle hedge; from the pond one screams and from the barn I hear the dairyman denouncing another that has got into the cow-feed. My kin are given to such phrases as, 'Let's face it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.”
― Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch