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"The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."
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"You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility."

"God has forgiven and still forgives us when we repent from our sins, an indication that we are not called to sin, but to live in accordance with His will."

"Pious people spoke to God, and crazy people imagined that God spoke back."
Explore more quotes by Flannery O'Connor

"There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence."

"The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live."

"It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals."

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

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

"The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable."
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