Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.
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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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The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.
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...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
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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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Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
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Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.
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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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The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
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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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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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Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.
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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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The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul
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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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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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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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Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.
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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.
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The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
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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.