Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.
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Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.
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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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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.
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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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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 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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No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.
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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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Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
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I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.
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The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
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There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na?ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na?ve than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end.
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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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It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.
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I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
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Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
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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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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 trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.
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The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
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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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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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If it's just a symbol, then to hell with it !