#devil

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. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#evil #fiction #grace #on-fiction #storytelling

Maybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own image ↗

— Dean Koontz

#human-nature #nature

Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#advantages #devil #disagreeable #distance #his

First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people. ↗

— Edward Bond

#first #need #now #people #theatre

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing. ↗

— James Buchan

#cause #classes #collapsing #devil #effect

She was strong and stubborn but loving. She was an untouchable angel with a devil’s mark. She was beautiful. ↗

— Shannon A. Thompson

#beauty #description #devil #loving #strong

The day of the daredevil reporter who refuses to see obstacles to getting the truth, and seeing it with his or her own eyes, seems to have died. ↗

— Alastair Campbell

#day #died #eyes #getting #her

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#general #good #i #language #long

I praticed making faces in the mirror and it would drive my mother crazy. She used to scare me by saying that I was going to see the devil if I kept looking in the mirror. That fascinated me even more, of course. ↗

— Jim Carrey

#crazy #devil #drive #even #faces

Talk of the devil, and his horns appear. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#devil #his #horns #talk