The good die when they should live, the evil live when they should die; heroes perish and cowards escape; noble efforts do not succeed because they are noble, and wickedness is consumed in its own nature. Looking at truth is not at first a heartening experience–it becomes so, if at all, only with time, with… Continue reading William Alexander Percy
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)
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)
[…] and your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory. — William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage, 1936)
Desire for her is like a sorrow in my heart. Ten minutes ago she rolled backwards in her little chair to hand me a letter and did not even touch me […] and here was the yellow-cotton smell of her and of the summer to come. Once she did touch my hand with the warm… Continue reading Walker Percy
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)
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
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
And at the very base of all of this was the rarest and most indispensable sustenance for literature: and that is memory. — Willie Morris, from “Sense of Place and Americanization of Mississippi,” The Past is not Dead: Essays from the Southern Quarterly, ed. Douglas B. Chambers, with Kenneth Watson, (University Press of Mississippi, 2012)
Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. — Carson McCullers, The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 1971)
The Vale of Soul-Making 