Books come from other books and lead to other books
The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor
Growing into God, John R. Mabry, Quest Books, 2012
Kierkegaard for Beginners,
I and Thou, Martin Buber
Notebooks of Simone Weil
The Divine Milieu, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie
Decreation by Anne Carson
Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald
A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor
Quotations
How does a being gather itself together, that is madly and unceasingly haunted in an empty circle by the separated I?
Martin Buber
But you cannot meet others in it [the ordered and detached world]. You cannot hold on to life without it, its reliability sustains you; but should you die in it, your grave would be in nothingness.
Martin Buber
Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing—how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then on thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of Nothing.
Martin Heidegger
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark, which belongs entirely to God… This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.
Thomas Merton
There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am still present “myself” this I recognize as an obstacle about which I do nothing unless he himself removes the obstacle. If he wills he can then make the Nothingness into total clarity. If he does not will, then the Nothingness seems to itself to be an object and remains an obstacle.
Thomas Merton
Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it.
Léon Bloy
Now such a soul is nothing, for she sees her nothingness by means of the abundance of divine understanding, which makes her nothing and places her in nothingness.
Marguerite Porete
I dreamt that I…was pregnant and full with Nothingness like a woman who is with child. And that out of this Nothingness God was born.
Meister Eckhart
Nothing is the most important part of the universe.
Lawrence Krause
Nothingness represents a return to the lawlessness of the primordial ooze without rules.
Charles Seife
Every step towards an origin is also an advance towards a silence.
Eavan Boland
I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God.
Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal