Flannery O'Connor Quotes
-
The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” (August 9, 1955)
-
She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.
-
Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.
-
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
-
The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.
-
Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.
-
... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.
-
I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
-
When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.
-
Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.
-
It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.
-
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.
-
We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.
-
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.
-
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
-
When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.
-
A God you understood would be less than yourself.
-
One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.
-
I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.
-
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
-
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.
-
If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
-
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
-
Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.