Two excerpts from Flannery O'Connor:
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"At last she lifted her head.
There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson
and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She
raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A
visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging
bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it
a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies
of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black
[negroes] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and
clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was
a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and
Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it
right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the
others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order
and common sense and respectable behavior. They, alone were on key. Yet she
could see by their shocked and altered faces even their virtues were being
burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her
eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision
faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
"At length she got down and turned
off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the
woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she
heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting
hallelujah."
-from "Revelation"
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"I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world as its relation to that."
-from Mystery and Manners
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