Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.” — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is… — 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
“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“When we get our spiritual house in order, we'll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able… — 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 only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“I don’t really think the standard of judgment, the missing link, you spoke of that you find in my stories emerges from… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer… — 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
“About hope, I am somewhat at a loss. It is so easy to say I hope to—the tongue slides over it. I… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
... Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The problem of the novelist who wishes to write about a man's encounter with God is how he shall make the experience--which… — 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
“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
“I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how… — 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
![“I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories…. What kept me a skeptic [of secularism]…” quote by Flannery O'Connor](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/bed/flannery-o-connor-639_christian-faith_i-have-got-over-the-years-a-sense-of-the_2715215.jpg)
