[Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“The world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are...There's a million times more dead than living and… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It's there, even when… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. "She would of been a good… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
He knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“I don’t know how to cure the source-itis except to tell you that I can discover a good many possible sources myself for Wise… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Mrs. May winced. She thought the word Jesus should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image