William Faulkner
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack. — William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Harrison Smith, 1930)
Category: Southern Gothic
Truman Capote
As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes. — Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, first published in 1956)
William Faulkner
[…] and your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory. — William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage, 1936)
Truman Capote
Think of nothing things. Think of wind. — Truman Capote, from “Shut a Final Door,” The Complete Stories of Truman Capote, (Vintage; Reprint edition September 13, 2005)
Truman Capote
We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed—begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it… Continue reading Truman Capote
Truman Capote
A kind of silence, if I may say, was walking through the house, and, like most silence, it was not silent at all: it rapped on the doors, echoed in the clocks, creaked on the stairs, leaned forward to peer into my face and explode. ― Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms. (Vintage; 5th or… Continue reading Truman Capote
Carson McCullers
Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. — Carson McCullers, The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 1971)
Flannery O’Connor
When we get our spiritual house in order, we’ll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty. ― Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal. Written in… Continue reading Flannery O’Connor
Truman Capote
Dolly said that when she was a girl she’d liked to wake up winter mornings and hear her father singing as he went about the house building fires; after he was old, after he’d died, she sometimes heard his songs in the field of Indian grass. Wind, Catherine said; and Dolly told her: But the… Continue reading Truman Capote
J. Todd Hawkins
& then there are those scrap poems,the ones too beautiful to finish writing,ones that would bring us too great a sadnessif we ever thought they could really end.There are many of those. — J. Todd Hawkins, from “Hooks Brothers,” This Geography of Thorns: Blues Poetry from the Mississippi Delta & Beyond (Poetry Society of Texas,… Continue reading J. Todd Hawkins
The Vale of Soul-Making 