Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
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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.
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The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
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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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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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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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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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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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Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.
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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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The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
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...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
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The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.
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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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The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.