QUOTATION: Faith

Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don't want to have created God to my own image.

--Flannery O'Connor, My Dear God: A Young Writer's Prayers

QUOTATION: Learning to Become Catholic

Discovering the Church is apt to be a slow procedure but it can only take place if you have a free mind and no vested interest in disbelief.

--Flannery O’Connor

QUOTATION: The Church is For Sinners

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

--Flannery O’Connor

QUOTATION: Knowledge of Self

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

QUOTATION: Liberal Protestantism

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, Letter to Alfred Corn, 1962.

QUOTATION: Religion

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.

--Flannery O'Connor

QUOTATION: Loneliness

 I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God.

--Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, 14/4/1947

QUOTATION: Faith and Unbelief

Let me tell you this: Faith comes and goes. But if it presumptuous to think faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.

--Flannery O’Connor

QUOTATION: Knowing God

I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

--Flannery O'Connor

QUOTATION: Grace Hurts

This notion that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the sword Christ said He came to bring.

--Flannery O'Connor

QUOTATION: Self-Acceptance

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

--Flannery O'Connor