top of page
.png){kind=small}
"His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Self quotes
"But for better or worse, I am not motivated by kindness."
"We must design how we wish to be perceived, and then we must work even harder to continuously recreate and re-evaluate that perception."
"Cut the connection between your clothes and your beliefs, because clothes will not make you something, it won't make you honest or dishonest, good or bad! Your essence will not change because of what you wear!"
"We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present."
"Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention."
"One day you will wake up, you will see with clear sight all that has held you back; you will feel lighter because you finally accept who you are. You will shine with flawless beauty because your happiness comes from the purity of your heart and one day I hope you realise all of this, before it's too late; because darling, if we spent our years nurturing the best of ourselves, heaven would be felt on earth."
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."
"Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith."
"He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence."
"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."
"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read 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."
bottom of page