Flannery O'Connor


Her peculiar strengths - her ability to convey real religious conviction, and the equal force of an individual's inner impulse to refuse and oppose it, and her dramatization of such conflict - are evident throughout The Violent Bear It Away, as are the wild humor and withering irony that characterize all her work. Her painterly descriptions of the settings mysteriously suggest a battleground for supernatural combat in which all of nature is taking part as witness.
- Sally Fitzgerald


The sound of the calliope coming through the window kept her awake and she remembered that she hadn't said her prayers and got up and knelt down and began them. She took a running start and went through to the other side of the Apostle's Creed and then hung by her chin on the side of the bed, empty-minded. Her prayers, when she remembered to say them, were usually perfunctory but sometimes when she had done something wrong or heard music or lost something, or sometimes for no reason at all, she would be moved to fervor and would think of Christ on the long journey to Calvary, crushed three times under the cross. Her mind would stay on this a while and then get empty and when something roused her, she would find that she was thinking of a different thing entirely, of some dog or some girl or something she was going to do some day.
"A Temple of the Holy Ghost"