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Flannery O'Connor
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“Enoch never nagged his blood to tell him a thing until it was ready.”
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“She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
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“If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.”
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“Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn't conceive of any other condition.”
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“They were drinking ginger ale on her front porch and she kept rattling the ice in her glass, rattling her beads, rattling her bracelet like an impatient pony jingling its harness.”
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“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.”
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“It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.”
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“She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, through she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”
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“'Somebody that's not busy call for the ambulance,' said the doctor in the off-hand voice young doctors adopt for terrible occasions.”
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“Once someone like her got a leg in the conversation, she would be all over it.”
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“The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.”
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“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”
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“... the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.”
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“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
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“The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. ... And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”
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“... the basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.”
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“... art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.”
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“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't write fiction. It isn't grand enough for you.”
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“We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. 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. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.”
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“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
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“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.”
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“No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.”
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“You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.”
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“He looked like a goat. He had little raisin eyes and a string beard ...”
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“When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls, or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.”
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“Unadaptability is often a virtue.”
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“I was a very ancient twelve; my views at that age would have done credit to a Civil War veteran. I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened. The weight of the centuries lies on children, I'm sure of it.”
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“The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.”
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“The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it.”
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“I certainly am glad you like the stories because now I feel it's not bad that I like them so much. The truth is I like them better than anybody and I read them over and over and laugh and laugh, then get embarrassed when I remember I was the one wrote them.”
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“Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God.”
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“It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them — in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.”
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“I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.”
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“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life, and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”
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“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”
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“... time is very dangerous without a rigid routine. If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.”
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“Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.”
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“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”
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“... I am also five three and in the neighborhood of one thirty. It is a neighborhood I would like to get out of ...”
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“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”
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“I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity — what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.”
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“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”
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“Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.”
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“Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.”
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“Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.”
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“A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.”
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“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.”
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“I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.”
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“I am not afraid the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.”
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“I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.”
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“Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.”
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“... Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.”
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“One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.”
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“When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.”
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“Many times I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing: if an idea does come between nine and twelve, I am there ready for it.”
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“The meaning of the story is the story.”
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“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.”
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“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”
Flannery O'Connor, U.S. writer
(1925 - 1964)
Full name: Mary Flannery O’Connor.