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.
When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.
To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.
The greater good is achieved by not only telling people what they need to know, but also filling them with a sense of empathy and love.
Real men stay faithful. They don't have time to look for other women because they're too busy looking for new ways to love their own.
When you have heartbreak, what's important is that you don't go halfway. Go all the way down. Don't take pills that keep you in limbo. Cry out all the feelings. Then your own energy for life will put you up again. You become stronger.
If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.
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