Flannery OConnor Quotes - Page 3

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.

A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.

The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.

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

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

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.

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

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.

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.

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

It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.

...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.

There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

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

Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

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

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.

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

Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

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

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

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.