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"The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible."
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"Thought, if I may put it, is the man behind the possession, appearance, things we like, things we hate and the very epitome of life."
"Your subconscious mind is the universal mind with a universal consciousness."
"Absolute is infinite so there is no absolute truth. There is truth that you can see in infinite ways and make your own."
"Every aspect of your life will be enlivened when you start to think and communicate with your heart and mind in cohesive coordinated harmony."
"Think about yourself because no one has time to think about you. Everyone is busy thinking about themselves."
"I don't claim to know everything, Wally. I only claim that everything can eventually be known."
"I don't know who you are or where you are, but I know your deep driving desires. I am writing to you to make your life a little easier and better."
"There are two kinds of people:those who learned to love and those who didn't."
"Any education that doesn't allow you to think freely is not an education but a prison."
"I came to this world to bloom and spread my love to fill the world with happiness."
Explore more quotes by Flannery O'Connor
"The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it."
"Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car."
"What one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness."
"Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them."
"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 truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth."
"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."
"I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction."
"I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway less burdened."
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