Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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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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I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.
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Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
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...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.
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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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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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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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All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
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It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.
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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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I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.
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You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.
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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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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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Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.
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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.
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If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
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There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion.
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The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.
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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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Poorly written novels--no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters--are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.
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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.
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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.
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A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.