Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs.… — 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
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive,… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art,… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the… — Flannery O'Connor Copy Share Image
I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside. — 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