Flannery O'Connor - Life Quotes

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When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.

Flannery O'Connor
The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery; that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.

Flannery O'Connor
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

Flannery O'Connor
He knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be one of the supreme moments in life but apart from that, he didn't have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.

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

Flannery O'Connor
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.

Flannery O'Connor
The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

Flannery O'Connor
She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." "Some fun!" Bobby Lee said. "Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life.

Flannery O'Connor
I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

Flannery O'Connor
"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Flannery O'Connor
The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.

Flannery O'Connor
You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!

Flannery O'Connor
The writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.

Flannery O'Connor
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Flannery O'Connor
I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.

Flannery O'Connor