Stephanie Loomis

“The author & the reader "know" each other: they meet on the bridge of words”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“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

“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

“You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose