Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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The meaning of the story is the story.
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Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
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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.
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Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.
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Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.
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We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.
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People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.
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When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.
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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.
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All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
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I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.
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The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.
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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.
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The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.
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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.
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I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I'm sure of it.
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...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
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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.
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What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
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In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite.