debbi rs > debbi rs's Quotes

“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it”
― Flannery O' Connor, Wise Blood

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”
― Flannery O'Connor , Wise Blood

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child's faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I love a lot of people, understand none of them...”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.

Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Grace changes us and change is painful".”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . . .”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor