Flannery O'connor Quotes - Page 2

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If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.

You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.

The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.

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

I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!

I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.

A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.

If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.

I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.

Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.

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

It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.

I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

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

If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.

You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

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