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Flannery O'Connor Quotes

American short story writer and novelist (b. 1925), Birth: 25-3-1925, Death: 3-8-1964 Flannery O'Connor Quotes
1.
You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.
Flannery O'Connor

Unearth redemption when your focus is on the suffering of others and not yourself.
2.
You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
Flannery O'Connor

3.
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Flannery O'Connor

4.
Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
Flannery O'Connor

5.
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Flannery O'Connor

Similar Authors: Ayn Rand Charles Dickens George Eliot Ambrose Bierce Chuck Palahniuk George R. R. Martin Jane Austen F. Scott Fitzgerald John Steinbeck Aldous Huxley Honore de Balzac Salman Rushdie Douglas Adams Ursula K. Le Guin George Saunders
6.
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. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
Flannery O'Connor

7.
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
Flannery O'Connor

8.
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

Quote Topics by Flannery O'Connor: Writing People Thinking Believe Fiction Mean Literature Fall Stories Life Way Southern Christian Book Children Character Real Ideas Church Catholic Eye Two Men Use Doe Art Would Be Teacher Quality Mind
9.
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.
Flannery O'Connor

10.
...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
Flannery O'Connor

11.
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.
Flannery O'Connor

12.
[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .
Flannery O'Connor

13.
It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth
Flannery O'Connor

14.
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
Flannery O'Connor

15.
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.
Flannery O'Connor

16.
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

17.
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.
Flannery O'Connor

18.
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
Flannery O'Connor

19.
I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
Flannery O'Connor

20.
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
Flannery O'Connor

21.
Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
Flannery O'Connor

22.
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.
Flannery O'Connor

23.
Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.
Flannery O'Connor

24.
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.
Flannery O'Connor

25.
I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.
Flannery O'Connor

26.
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
Flannery O'Connor

27.
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
Flannery O'Connor

28.
In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
Flannery O'Connor

29.
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.
Flannery O'Connor

30.
To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
Flannery O'Connor

31.
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.
Flannery O'Connor

32.
Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.
Flannery O'Connor

33.
Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.
Flannery O'Connor

34.
It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.
Flannery O'Connor

35.
A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.
Flannery O'Connor

36.
When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.
Flannery O'Connor

37.
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.
Flannery O'Connor

38.
When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing, haloed suns.
Flannery O'Connor

39.
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
Flannery O'Connor

40.
I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.
Flannery O'Connor

41.
Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.
Flannery O'Connor

42.
I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.
Flannery O'Connor

43.
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
Flannery O'Connor

44.
You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
Flannery O'Connor

45.
One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.
Flannery O'Connor

46.
In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.
Flannery O'Connor

47.
A God you understood would be less than yourself.
Flannery O'Connor

48.
It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.
Flannery O'Connor

49.
The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.
Flannery O'Connor

50.
Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.
Flannery O'Connor