Writing Quote by Flannery O'Connor

““Writing this, he had reached the pit of despair and he thought that reading it, she would at least begin to sense his tragedy and her part in it. It was not that she had ever forced her way on him. That had never been necessary. Her way had simply been the air he breathed and when at last he had found other air, he couldn't survive in it. He felt that even if she didn't understand at once, the letter would leave her with an enduring chill and perhaps in time lead her to see herself as she was.””

Flannery O'Connor

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Writing

More by Flannery O'Connor

“Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried…

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... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to…

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“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 Blood but I am often embarrassed to find that I read the sources after I had written the book. I have been exposed to Wordsworth’s “Intimation” ode but that is all I can say about it.…

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“For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.”

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Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

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To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

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“He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is…

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“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. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not…

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Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories…

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“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”

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“Mrs. May winced. She thought the word Jesus should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.”

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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…

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