Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.
Interpretation
Children inherently understand the importance of love, recognizing its absence as a form of suffering.
This quote suggests that children possess a natural intuition about love and its significance in their lives. Flannery O'Connor emphasizes that a lack of love is akin to experiencing hell, highlighting how vital affection and emotional connection are to well-being, especially in the formative years of childhood. Children can identify love and its absence, demonstrating their sensitivity to emotional environments.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a parenting seminar focused on emotional intelligence in children.
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
What people donβt realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.
Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.
The one who will be found in trial capable of great acts of love is ever the one who is always doing considerate small ones.
You don't love someone because they're perfect," she says. "You love them in spite of the fact that they're not." I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty-five years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather green.
Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.
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