Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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If it's just a symbol, then to hell with 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 Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.
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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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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.
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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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When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
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There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.
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Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
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The life you save may very well be your own.
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Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
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There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
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I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.
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The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
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... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.
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I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.
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I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.
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It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.
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The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.
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There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.
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Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
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Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.
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I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.
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Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.