Flannery O'Connor Quotes
-
It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.
-
Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.
-
To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
-
...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
-
If it's just a symbol, then to hell with it !
-
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.
-
The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.
-
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
-
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.
-
Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.
-
Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
-
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.
-
Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.
-
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.
-
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it
-
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
-
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
-
There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.
-
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.
-
The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
-
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.
-
She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." "Some fun!" Bobby Lee said. "Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life.
-
I don’t want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.
-
Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.