The Catholic fiction writer has very little high-powered "Catholic" fiction to influence him except that written by these three [Bloy, Bernanos, Mauriac] and Greene. But at some point reading them reaches the place of diminishing returns and you get more benefit from reading someone like Hemingway, where there is apparently a hunger for a Catholic completeness in life.
-- Flannery O'Connor. January 16, 1956. The Habit of Being
The man was hungry for everything so
why not God? Wine by the bottle, beer by
the case, fresh-bled bull roasted on a spit,
fish dragged from the sea on a thin pole
wielded by a man mad for its wet meat.
He wanted it all and got it. But it
could not be enough. Wife after wife
tried hard to satisfy his starved heart.
What made him close to happy was his art.
The daily dalliance with the blank page
was where he sought you out, trying to name
what he lacked at the center of his lone-
ly soul, an agon he loved and hated,
the one hunger that could not be sated.
-- Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O'Connor.
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