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.
Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.
That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3
Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare; And beauty draws us with a single hair.
The ones that love us never really leave us.
We lay on the ground and kissed. Perhaps you smile. That we only lay on the ground and kissed. You young people can lend your bodies now, play with them, give them as we could not. But remember that you have paid a price: that of a world rich in mystery and delicate emotion. It is not only species of animal that die out. But whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know. But pity yourself for what it did.
In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression.
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