Flannery O’Connor quotes - page 4

The life you save may very well be your own. (Flannery O’Connor)
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. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
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. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
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. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best. (Flannery O’Connor)
When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
There are all kinds of truth... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol. Her response was, "If it's only a symbol, to hell with it. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little 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. View quote
Flannery O’Connor
There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however nave that may have been, it was a good deal less nave than some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to some deeper end. (Flannery O’Connor)