The Violent Bear It Away Quotes

“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness and when the time came for him to lose his balance he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy’s breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are...There's a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive...”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“Its face was like the face she had seen in some medieval paintings where the martyr’s limbs are being sawed off and his expression says he is being deprived of nothing essential.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“You can't just say NO," he said. "You got to do NO. You got to show it. You got to show you mean it by doing it. You got to show you're not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to make an end of it. One way or another.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“He kept on digging but the grave did not get any deeper. “The dead are poor,” he said in the voice of the stranger. You can’t be any poorer than dead.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Savior at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. Buford had come along about noon and when he left at sundown, the boy, Tarwater, had never returned from the still.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customers' families and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote 'cancer' after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word 'cancer' and wrote 'dead' there. "And I say thank God when they're dead," the salesman said; "that's one less to remember.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“He don't know it's anything he can't know," the old man said. "That's his trouble. He thinks if it's something he can't know then somebody smarter than him can tell him about it and he can know it just the same. And if you were to go there, the first thing he would do would be to test your head and tell you what you were thinking and howcome you were thinking it and what you ought to be thinking instead. And before long you wouldn't belong to your self no more, you would belong to him.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“That's not the way he told it, Tarwater said. He said that when the schoolteacher was seven years old, he had good sense but later it dried up. His daddy was an ass and not fit to raise him and his mother was a whore. She ran away from here when she was eighteen years old.

It took her that long? the stranger said in an incredulous tone. My, she was kind of a ass herself.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“In the darkest, most private part of his soul, hanging upsidedown like a sleeping bat, was the certain, undeniable knowledge that he was not hungry for the bread of life.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“His thoughts were heavy as if they had to struggle up through some dense medium to reach the surface of his mind.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“He had learned enough to hate the destruction that had to come and not all that was going to be destroyed.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“And as for that strangeness in your gut, that comes from you, not the Lord. When you were a child you had worms. As likely as not you have them again.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“Intermittently the boy’s jagged shadow slanted across the road ahead of him as if it cleared a rough path toward his goal. His singed eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed already to envision the fate that awaited him but he moved steadily on, his face set toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“His eyes as they turned and looked down at her were the color of the lake just before dark when the last daylight has faded and the moon has not risen yet, and for an instant she thought she saw something fleeing across the surface of them, a lost light that came from nowhere and vanished into nothing. For some moments they stared at each other without issue. Finally, convinced she had not seen it, she muttered, “Whatever devil’s work you mean to do, don’t do it here.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“You weren’t anything to him but something that would grow big enough to bury him when the time came and now that he’s dead, he’s shut of you but you got two hundred and fifty pounds of him to put below the face of the earth.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“There's a part of your mind that works all the time, that you're not aware of yourself. Things go on in it. All sorts of things you don't know about.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“Tarwater clenched his fists. He stood like one condemned waiting at the spot of execution. Then the revelation came, silent, implacable, direct as a bullet. He did not look in the eyes of any fiery beast or see a burning bush. He only knew, with a certainty sunk in despair, that he was expected to baptize that child he saw and begin the life his great-uncle prepared for him. He knew that he was called to be a prophet and that the ways of his prophecy would not be remarkable. His black pupils, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, until at last he received his reward, a broken fish, a multiplied loaf. The Lord out of dust had created him, had made him blood and nerve and mind, had made him to bleed and weep and think, and set him in a world of loss and fire to baptize one idiot child that he need not have created in the first place and to cry out a gospel just as foolish. He tried to shout, “NO!” but it was like trying to shout in his sleep. The sound was saturated in silence, lost.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“He sat down on a long pine box on the back porch and his hands began absently to unravel a length of rope while his long face stared ahead beyond the clearing over the woods that ran in grey and purple folds until they touched the light blue fortress line of trees set against the empty morning sky.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“He was a bull-like old man with a short head set directly into his shoulders and silver protruding eyes that looked like two fish straining to get out of a net of red threads.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away