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A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.
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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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 -
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 -
Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
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 -
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
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
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The dead don't bother with particulars.
Flannery O'Connor -
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
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 -
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 -
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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Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
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 -
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
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 -
I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
Flannery O'Connor -
The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
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 -
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 -
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
Flannery O'Connor -
Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.
Flannery O'Connor