“I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense, sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company; where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a  very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” —Flannery O’Connor, 1956.

The southern and Catholic author was diagnosed with lupus in 1951, the same disease that killed her father when she was a teenager. She died in 1964 having lived and suffered and wrote and thrived with lupus for 13 years.