О’Коннор, Фланнери цитаты

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“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

“The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.”

“Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”

“He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery…”

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism… it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”

“He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.'

'What you got on it?' the girl said.

'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.'

'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.”

“The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”

“It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.”

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

“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”

“Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.”

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”

“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.”

“I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

“Grace changes us and change is painful".”

“The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”

“She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.”

“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility…”

“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

“When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.”

“Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.”

“The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”
(August 9, 1955)”