“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

“I write to discover what I know.”

“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it”

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”

“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”

“She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”

“If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.”

“In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”

“Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

“Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”

“The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.”

“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...”

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child's faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you fell you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God. ”

“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”

“I love a lot of people, understand none of them...”

“Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.”

“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.”

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”

“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”

“It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.”

“I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”

“The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.

Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?”

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”

“The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.”

“Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.”

“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.'

'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.”

“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”

“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .”

“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”

“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness. ”

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”

“Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.”

“Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”

Nothing has ever changed my music-listening habits so thoroughly as the pandemic.

Since I was a teenager in the 1970s, I have always been attracted to the newest music, always willing to dive into new genres as they developed, always ready to see a new band based on nothing more than one friend’s recommendation.

Over the last 13 months, I could probably count on two hands the number of new albums I’ve listened to. I don’t think my interest in the new is gone forever. I expect that when we get back to something that looks like normal, I’ll get musically curious agin.

But as I’ve languished through this never-ending plague, I needed something different from my music. I did not need to be challenged. I did not need to be spurred to action. I needed comfort.

I found it by diving into a lot of music by musicians who were performing long before I was born. So I’ve put together a list of five artists whose music gave me the comfort I needed during the pandemic.

The Blind Boys of Alabama

The Blind Boys have been singing gospel music since 1939. Of course, the members have changed over the years, but the group has never gone out of existence. The group emerged originally from the chorus of the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talladega, Alabama. I can’t wait for the return of live shows, because the experience of seeing the Blind Boys in person is simply transcendent. It feels like you’re going to church, because you are.

The Carter Family

There’s a town called Bristol that sits astraddle the Tennessee/Virginia border. Ralph Peer, a record producer from New York City, traveled to Bristol in 1927 in search of “hillbilly” musicians to record. The days Peer spent in Bristol in late July and early August of that year are now called the “Big Bang of Country Music.” Among the musicians Peer recorded was the Carter Family — A.P., Sara, and Maybelle. No other group ever had such broad influence on the evolution of an entire genre of music. Their music transports any listener to the Appalachian mountains, with a sound that’s as timeless as the mountains themselves.

Louis Armstrong

Just as the Carter Family essentially invented country music, there’s a strong argument that jazz would never have evolved as it has without the work of Louis Armstrong. A product of New Orleans, Armstrong emerged as a pioneering trumpeter in the 1920s, and he retained his influence on jazz until his death in 1971. Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker who produced a multi-episode history of jazz for PDF, once said, “Armstrong is to music what Einstein is to physics and the Wright Brothers are to travel." But I think Armstrong might did something neither Einstein nor the Wright Brothers could do: He brought delight to everyone, every time he picked up his horn.

Precious Bryant

If you want to go really deep into the roots of American music, the people to help you reside at the Music Maker Foundation in Hillsborough, North Carolina. For more than 25 years, Music Maker has preserved the music of blues, folks, and gospel musicians who were rarely heard outside their own communities. (Bonus: Music Maker also helps these musicians meet their daily needs.) I spent a lot of time rummaging through the vast Music Maker catalog over the last few months, and the most precious thing I found was a woman named Precious Bryant, who was born in Talbot County, Georgia. Her fingerstyle blues picking and her warm voice found a special place in my heart.

Otis Redding

There are several places around the South that folks say gave birth to soul music. Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama, Memphis, Tennessee, New Orleans, Louisiana. But too many folks forget to mention Macon, Georgia, the hometown of Otis Redding. In the early 1960s, Redding met Macon record producer Phil Walden, who would later turn Macon into the birthplace of Southern rock with the Allman Brothers Band and others. But to my ears, Walden’s greatest discovery was always Redding — the Big O. He died far too young, only 26, when he died in a Wisconsin plane crash, but he left behind an amazing body of work, all created with a voice that was like no other before or since. 

I adore ferns. I like small dainty ferns, mid-sized compact ferns, and giant lush ferns that take up too much space to keep in the house. I have always thought that if you don’t love ferns then, then maybe you’re not really Southern.

When I’m out on a drive, nothing makes my heart happier than seeing an elegant porch lined with hanging ferns. My grandmother lived in a simple country house with a screened porch, so she couldn’t showcase her ferns like that. But she always managed to make ordinary ferns grow to extraordinary lengths on wrought-iron stands on each side of her front door. I’ve managed to grow huge ferns outside in very large pots, but I have never equaled the beauty and length of the ferns that welcomed guests into Maw-Maw’s home. She swore by Epsom salts: one tablespoon in a gallon of water, given to the ferns once a month. But I don’t know another soul who has succeeded with that formula. In fact, my aunt once killed every fern she had by following that recipe.

I will do almost anything to keep my ferns alive. My grandmother did, too. She used to keep them in her root cellar over the winter, under a grow lamp, but she was never able to keep very many alive. Still, she tried it every year. My poor grad-school roommates in Pittsburgh had to put up with my straggly ferns shedding leaves all over the floor while I desperately misted them in hopes of keeping them alive through the ungodly cold and short days of January and February. 

What it comes down to is this: My life feels empty without ferns. I’d rather nurse them through a bad patch than heartlessly discard them at the first sign of strain. In a few more weeks, spring will be here, and I’ll be bringing out ferns from their winter home in our basement. I’ll be splitting some of them, repotting them, reviving them.

I can’t wait.

But you must always remember that growing ferns is an exercise in compromise and humility. Ferns grow where they want to grow — not where you want them to grow. They need light, but not too much light. They need more water than you think they do, but are always at risk of being over-watered. Until you get them in a spot that they like, they can be finicky and high-maintenance. But when you and the fern finally agree on a location and a watering schedule, that fern will bring elegance and grace to the most humble of homes. 

A lush, healthy fern communicates a sense of Southern hospitably as earnestly as fine china or chinoiserie wallpaper. It says that your host cared enough to compromise with a fussy and exacting plant in order to reveal its full beauty, and then share that beauty with you, her guest.

The patient fern-keepers represent the kind of South I want to live in.