Quote of the Day

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Before coming he had read facts in the almanac and he knew that there were 60,000 people here who were seeing him for the first time. He wanted to stop and shake hands with each of them and say his name was Francis M. Tarwater and that he was here only for the day to accompany his uncle on business at a lawyer's. His head jerked backwards after each passing figure until they began to pass too thickly and he observed that their eyes didn't grab at you like the eyes of country people. Several of them bumped into him and this contact that should have made an acquaintance for life made nothing because the hulks shoved on with ducked heads and muttered apologies that he would have accepted if they had waited. At the lawyer's window, he had knelt down and let his face hang out upside-down over the floating speckled street moving like a river of tin below and had watched the glints on it from the sun which drifted pale in a pale sky. You have to do something particular here to make them look at you, he thought. They ain't going to look at you just because God made you. When I come for good, he said to himself, I'll do something to make every eye stick on me for what I done; and leaning forward, he saw his hat drop down gently, lost and casual, dallied slightly by the breeze on its way to be smashed in the traffic below.

~ Flannery O'Connor, You Can't Be Any Poorer Than Dead