Walking a Literary Labyrinth Quotes

“You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth

“I often look around in a church at the utterly expressionless faces singing "Alleluia! Alleluia!" and wonder why we don't let our faces know what our lips are saying.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth

“It feels like cheap sex and spurious art to me, the spiritual equivalent of junk food; it may look like an éclair, but it's really a Twinkie.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth

“And like Vera, I know that "truth lies beyond." I know that faith - like chastity, like intimacy, like the journey to the self - is an ongoing process. Yes, we do walk the labyrinth to the center of every greater knowledge of ourselves as we do in books like Gordimer's. We may also learn from them, as Vera learned, that no single human relationship can fulfill us, draw a small circle around who we are or can be. Others, alas, are as limited, as frail - and as mortal - as we are. We will be compelled, somehow, to leave the center we have found, and continue on our journey. For, self-transcending beings that we are, it is not the center that symbolizes our true selves but the entire labyrinth. If we are courageous enough not to give up on life, on human relationships, or on ourselves - as we surmise from the tone of the last passage is the case with Vera - we will walk it many times, inward and outward, each time going more deeply within, each time reaching out in a wider embrace. And we will have, thanks to the writers among us, not a single book - no single book can satisfy us, either - but many books to accompany us like intimate friends at each stage of the journey, to lead us yet closer to the truth that, as long as we live, lies beyond.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth

“But finally, what is it all about?

It took me the writing of this entire book to discover that I think it is about love. That little word--eros, caritas, agape. That little spark, the trace in us of the Transcendent Other, who loves all creation, and who calls us to ever greater self-transcending love for and communion with all. Our reading, as it displays the whole world to us for our cherishing, may be a kind of -Contemplatio ad Amorem-, the concluding meditation in Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, which calls us to find the love of God for us in all things, and all things in the God of love.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth

“Books contain both our memories and our hopes, shape them, in some cases create them. Since the first human put chisel to stone, we have traveled a long distance in our inner and outward journeys, so much of what we know of these journeys preserved for us in writing. Now when an author puts the first word on paper or screen, she commits an act of hope. And every time we open a book, so do we. We hope for all kinds of things from a book--pleasure, knowledge, insight, intimacy, greater understanding of others and ourselves, beauty. But reading can also, in a deeper and more inchoate fashion, -give- us hope. Hope that there is a God whose extravagant fecundity is the source of the mysterious creative impulse of the artists among us. That the care and attention writers lavish on their characters are bestowed on us by our Creator. And that there is in life the kind of wholeness achieved in a great work of literature--a master narrative in which, though we cannot always see how, your story and mine have their part.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth

“...we use images to express the boundlessness of human hope and desire--for eternal life, unconditional love, unlimited communion.... None of these articles of faith, including those that recall the story of Jesus, are provable in the way of mathematics or science. Or even of history. It is central to my own belief that Jesus was a real historical person; historical study can support my belief but it cannot prove it. The truths of faith are precisely, according to traditional Roman Catholic teaching, those that cannot be known by reason alone; that is why they are 'revealed.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth

“I can hardly conceive of how limited my perception would be without the books I have been privileged to read, how superficial my understanding of others, how underdeveloped my sympathies. And I mean here, especially, without fiction, which pus flesh and blood on, and soul and feeling in, other human beings. Precisely because of its appeal to my imagination, which -Webster's- dictionary defines as 'the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality,' in fiction I come to know and understand people I may not have met otherwise. And thus I am persuaded to a more compassionate, generous, and loving response in my life beyond books.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth

“...the church and other guardians of public morality have a point. Sex is powerful; passionate love can be transgressive of the good order of society. It can be sinful, causing great harm and pain to others. And the erotic in literature may beguile, seduce....The solution is not, however, to deny but to recognize and accept the power of this aspect of our humanity, and to channel it into fruitfulness and productivity, to see it as a gift from God, to find God in it. And to rejoice in being fully alive, body and soul for the glory of God.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth

“Pornographic literature depicts sex in explicit or bizarre or even intentionally degrading and dehumanizing detail. Designed by the author and used by the reader specifically for sexual stimulation, it serves no literary end. It commodifies sex. It is a product, not literature, and the person who uses it is primarily a consumer, not a reader. In its baser forms the pornographic appeals to the baser instincts, the selfish, the violent in us. In its milder forms, pornography presents the physical/sexual to appeal only to the physical/sexual in us, and hence tells less than half the story of being human. And we are left with a world in which, contrary to a spirituality that finds God in all things, including sex, nothing is sacred, everything is profane.”
― Nancy M. Malone, Walking a Literary Labyrinth