"I write to discover what I know," and more Flannery O'Connor quotes (Part 2)

This is the second in a two part series on quotes from American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964). An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

Here are some more of my favorite quotes from her (there were others in my previous post). Let me know which ones resonate with you.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.

I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.

It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories…. What kept me a skeptic [of secularism] in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read. If you want your faith, you have to work for it…. Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism.

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.

The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.

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 fell 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.

Grace changes us and change is painful.

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

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.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

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.

The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

Sickness is more instructive than a long trip to Europe.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

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.

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

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.

My subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

I love a lot of people, understand none of them.

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

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 that what I see in the world I see in relation to that.

Not sentimental love but true Charity is what is hard and endures.

As was usual with him, he began with the least important thing and worked around and in toward the center where the meaning was.

I write to discover what I know.

Thoughts?

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it," and other quotes from Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from her. Let me know which ones resonate with you.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

Anyone who survives childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.

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.

I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

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.

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

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.

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

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.

The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

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.

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

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.

The greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama.

I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.

More next week. Any thoughts on these now?