Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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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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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.
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Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.
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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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Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.
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Unadaptability is often a virtue.
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You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!
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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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It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.
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... Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.
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Christianity is a strangely cheery religion.
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If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.
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Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.
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I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.
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Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.
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I write to discover what I know.
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The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
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Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.
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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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... 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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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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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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You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.