When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle.
Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.
The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.
I don't know which is worse—to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there,...
He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.
I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.
[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 c...
Writing this, he had reached the pit of despair and he thought that reading it, she would at least begin to sense his tragedy and her part in it. It was not that she had ever forced her way on him. Th...
The dead are a heap more trouble than the living.
Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of Wise Blood that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant . . .
To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn't have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a...
I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord. Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.
Do you think, Mr. Motes, she said hoarsely, that when you’re dead, you’re blind? I hope so, he said after a minute. Why? she asked, staring at him. After a while he said, If there’s no bottom in your...
You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a posit...
Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
The thing for you to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit u...
The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way w...
Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.