Quotes About Revelation

I looked at my hand through it and saw nothing that was recognisable. Then I looked at several other things but saw nothing that I could clearly see. MacCruiskeen took it back with a smile at my puzzled eye. It magnifies to invisibility, he explained. It makes everything so big that there is room in the glass for only the smallest particle of it—not enough of it to make it different from any other thing that is dissimilar.

He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.' 'What you got on it?' the girl said. 'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.' 'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . . .

I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary in spite of his opinion.

Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn't have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. That is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do.

Jesus thrown everything off balance.

I write to discover what I know

Some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation.

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children.

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.

Who's there?" the voice from inside said and there was a quality about it now that seemed final. The knob rattled and the voice said peremptorily, "Who's there, I ast you?" Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed keyhole. "Obadiah," he whispered and all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts.

Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.

If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.

Vi är allesammans fördömda, sa hon, men somliga av oss har tagit av oss ögonbindlarna och sett att inget finns att se. Det är en slags frälsning.

You found out more when you left where you lived. He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ.

You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.

We're all damned, she said, "but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation.

And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said—without warning "Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!" she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, "Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!

I was born in a wreck and my mothers a whore.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. . . . [Thus] there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.