Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.
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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.
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Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
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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.
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She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint.
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Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
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I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
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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.
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Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
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The dead don't bother with particulars.
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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.
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I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
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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.
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I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
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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.
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Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.
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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.
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Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
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I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
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The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
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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.
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Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.
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The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
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The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.