Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
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Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.
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The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.
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I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.
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Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
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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.
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...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
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At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
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The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.
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Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
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Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.
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To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
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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.
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The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
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There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
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He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.
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Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.
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Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.
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When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.
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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.
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The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.
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You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
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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.
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The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.