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But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.
Flannery O'Connor -
Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
Flannery O'Connor
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The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.
Flannery O'Connor -
Whenever Iām asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
Flannery O'Connor -
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint.
Flannery O'Connor -
Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
Flannery O'Connor -
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
Flannery O'Connor -
That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
Flannery O'Connor
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The dead don't bother with particulars.
Flannery O'Connor -
I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.
Flannery O'Connor -
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
Flannery O'Connor -
I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
Flannery O'Connor -
I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
Flannery O'Connor -
Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.
Flannery O'Connor
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Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O'Connor -
Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
Flannery O'Connor -
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
Flannery O'Connor -
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.
Flannery O'Connor -
When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.
Flannery O'Connor -
The Bible was the only book he read. He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.
Flannery O'Connor
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There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.
Flannery O'Connor -
I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
Flannery O'Connor -
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
Flannery O'Connor -
The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
Flannery O'Connor