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It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.
Flannery O'Connor -
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!
Flannery O'Connor
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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.
Flannery O'Connor -
You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.
Flannery O'Connor -
Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.
Flannery O'Connor -
Kindness and patience were always called for.
Flannery O'Connor -
When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.
Flannery O'Connor -
... 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.
Flannery O'Connor
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I write to discover what I know.
Flannery O'Connor -
If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor -
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
Flannery O'Connor -
Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
Flannery O'Connor -
Grace changes us and change is painful.
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. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor -
Unadaptability is often a virtue.
Flannery O'Connor -
I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.
Flannery O'Connor -
Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.
Flannery O'Connor
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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.
Flannery O'Connor -
Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.
Flannery O'Connor -
A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.
Flannery O'Connor -
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.
Flannery O'Connor