Flannery O'Connor · 1281 pages
Rating: (2.9K votes)
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
“The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any type of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of his country are the sides of his skull.”
“Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.”
“When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.”
“THIS IS WHAT TOM CRUISE BELIEVES IN”
“But love of one kind will never duplicate itself. Love has its variety...which possibly makes it as a great as all the songs and stories and poems.”
“I’m not here to fight, Nate,” Jenny said. That was strange, because my first impulse was to throw a giant ball of flame at her. “You shot me,” I said holding back my sudden anger. “With a tranquilizer dart.” “Oh, that’s okay then. Wanna shoot me a few more times?” Jenny smiled; she had a nice smile. She’d”
“May it be written. May it be done.”
“All that I have, up to this moment, accepted as possessed of the highest truth and certainty, I received either from or through the senses. I observed, however, that these sometimes misled us; and it is the part of prudence not to place absolute confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.”
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