I am a little annoyed with the internet right now for its failure to make the important and necessary distinction between what an author says and what an author's character says. In the usual Flannery O'Connor quotes collected on all kinds of internet sites there is one without any cite or reference, making it appear as if it is O'Connor who saying this:
"I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth."
Yes, O'Connor wrote those words — but they were not her words, rather they came from the mouth her character the Preacher Hazel Motes in her brilliant novel, Wise Blood (Chapter 10, 1952 edition). Motes, like many of O'Connor's characters is haunted by religion and Christ — determined to bluster against his fear by creating his own "Church Without Christ." This quote makes perfect sense as Motes tries to deny that there might be an ultimate truth — God's truth — which O'Connor most certainly believed in though the quote as it appears on the internet gives a different impression.
So imagine…those of us who write… if we should be remembered by the quotes of our troubled and twisted characters as though they represented without qualification our own convictions. Annoying sloppiness of the internet (especially when the cite they offer is their own website, not the origin in O'Connor's writing from where the quote is taken.)
Yes. *Very* frustrating. Equally annoying is the tendency to take lines entirely out of context. I once saw–engraved on a wedding ring–a line from the scene in Richard III where Richard is trying to seduce Anne despite his having murdered her husband and her father-in-law.
Because Shakespeare’s romantic, you know.
Oh my…what a weird voodoo to put on a wedding ring. Why don’t people check these things out???
I’m reminded of the Barbara Kingsolvers new-ish book, “The Lacuna”, where the main character’s books are banned from bookstores because he is “dangerous”… McCarthy era… I hadn’t really thought about that much before. Not something we painters have to worry about, unless, of course, I haven’t thought this all through.
and that is quite something to quote Shakespeare in that way! Yikes!!