Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
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The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.
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Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.
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I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.
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People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
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It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.
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... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.
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Unadaptability is often a virtue.
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Kindness and patience were always called for.
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I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from, and no Redemption because there was no Fall, and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.
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Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.
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A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
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The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.
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I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.
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Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
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He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.
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I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.
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If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.
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Grace changes us and change is painful.
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I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.
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The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
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I write to discover what I know.
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A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.
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The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.