Flannery O’Connor: Trending quotes (page 2)

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

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it”

“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.”

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

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

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”

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

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

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”

“In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”

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

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

“Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”

“He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery…”

“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.”

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”

“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.”