Flannery O'Connor Quotes
-
Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.
-
The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.
-
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.
-
When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.
-
A God you understood would be less than yourself.
-
Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you’re not a lady? she says.
-
Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.
-
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
-
I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.
-
In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.
-
Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.
-
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.
-
The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” (August 9, 1955)
-
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 come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.
-
... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.
-
Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.
-
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.
-
Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.
-
If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.
-
Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
-
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.
-
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
-
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.