Flannery OConnor Quotes - Page 5

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

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

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.

Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.

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

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

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.

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

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.

She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Grace changes us and change is painful".

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.

The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.

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.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

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.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.

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.

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.

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

... Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.

There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.