Flannery O'Connor Quotes
-
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint.
-
Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
-
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.
-
Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
-
The dead don't bother with particulars.
-
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.
-
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
-
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.
-
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
-
I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.
-
Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
-
Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.
-
The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
-
I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
-
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.
-
Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.
-
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.