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81 " 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. "
― Flannery O'Connor ,
82 " 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. "
― Flannery O'Connor , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
83 " In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about. "
84 " [W]hat 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. "
― Flannery O'Connor , The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
85 " 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
86 " His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it. "
― Flannery O'Connor , The Complete Stories
87 " The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don't hold nothing back. "
― Flannery O'Connor , A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
88 " It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant. "
― Flannery O'Connor , The Violent Bear It Away
89 " 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. "
90 " Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama. "
91 " Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin. "
92 " There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy. "
93 " So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence. "
― Flannery O'Connor
94 " The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater. "
95 " He had measured five feet four inches of pure gamecock. "
96 " If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you. "
97 " I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself. "
98 " I came from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. "
99 " For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. "
100 " The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself. "