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 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
“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
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
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom. — 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 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
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
“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
“If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.” — 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
“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
“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
Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not. — 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
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
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
“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
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
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
“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
... 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
“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
“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
