There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

Flannery O'Connor

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

Flannery O'Connor

change life funny

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

Flannery O'Connor

demand charity remember

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

Flannery O'Connor

suffering people christ

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

Flannery O'Connor

humorous truth funny

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Flannery O'Connor

soul dark night

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

Flannery O'Connor

hunts down-and ifs

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. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

Flannery O'Connor

would-be writing fiction

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.

Flannery O'Connor

able southern writing

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

Flannery O'Connor

cherish struggle world

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.

Flannery O'Connor

childhood lasts southern

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.

Flannery O'Connor

people religion thinking

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.

Flannery O'Connor

women sweet believe

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .

Flannery O'Connor

humility self way

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

Flannery O'Connor

human-nature catholic grace

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.

Flannery O'Connor

garbage looks fiction

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 upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.

Flannery O'Connor

christian fall thinking

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

Flannery O'Connor

understood would-be

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

Flannery O'Connor

strangeness artist

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech

Flannery O'Connor

quality southern two

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. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. 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.

Flannery O'Connor

writing teacher school