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If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.
Flannery O'Connor -
The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.
Flannery O'Connor
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There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech.
Flannery O'Connor -
The meaning of the story is the story.
Flannery O'Connor -
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
Flannery O'Connor -
...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
Flannery O'Connor -
A God you understood would be less than yourself.
Flannery O'Connor -
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.
Flannery O'Connor
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All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
Flannery O'Connor -
Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story.
Flannery O'Connor -
Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
Flannery O'Connor -
If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.
Flannery O'Connor -
Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.
Flannery O'Connor -
There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.
Flannery O'Connor
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I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.
Flannery O'Connor -
For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.
Flannery O'Connor -
The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which is both natural and supernatural--understandable, and credible, to his reader. In any age this would be a problem, but in our own, it is a well- nigh insurmountable one. Today's audience is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.
Flannery O'Connor -
Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don't want to have created God to my own image as they're so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don't let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it.
Flannery O'Connor -
I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.
Flannery O'Connor -
We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.
Flannery O'Connor
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It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.
Flannery O'Connor -
The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery; that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.
Flannery O'Connor -
Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.
Flannery O'Connor -
Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when he can't see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.
Flannery O'Connor