[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 . . .

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

Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.