Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
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You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
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The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
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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.
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I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.
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I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.
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In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
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The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
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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.
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Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
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I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
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Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.
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I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
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I'm a full-time believer in writing habits...You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.
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I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.
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The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.
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I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.
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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
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Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
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The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.
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St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.
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The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
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She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
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In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.