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"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay."
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Exlpore more Experience quotes
"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."
"Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work."
"Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake."
"To 'live' is to realize that without the journey the destination is nothing more than a task rigorously completed rather than an experience riotously lived."
"Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs."
"I have found little that is "good" about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think."
"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."
"Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else."
"Any experience can be transformed into something of value."
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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