Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
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Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.
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I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.
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Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.
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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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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.
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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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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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All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
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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 write to discover what I know.
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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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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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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 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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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 way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of 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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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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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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Grace changes us and change is painful.
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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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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.