Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.
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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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The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
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I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
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I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.
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Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.
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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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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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I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
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Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
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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.
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Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
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Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
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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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[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .
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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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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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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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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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Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
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The dead don't bother with particulars.
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It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.
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Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.
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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.