Flannery O'Connor Quotes

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

It's a natural thing for a child to lose a parent. I lost my mom too young but it happened. And I'm happy she's out of pain, 'cause I love her and she's my friend.

I remember when I was playing for Pequeninos, I'd see some of the kids after the match with their fathers, and I was alone. That was heavy for me. It marked me.

My parents hate each other, and I think that's why I never wanted anyone to get close to me.

If I had to imagine life without my family, it would be very difficult.

Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother?

I lay in bed at night crying to myself. The only one who loved me and watched over me was someone I couldn't see or hear or touch.

It's like my garden, love. Everything grows. Including love. And with that growing everyday how can you expect missing her to ever fade away? Everything builds, including our ability to cope with it. That's how we keep going.

When I was a child, I never played with other children. I hated them.

My purpose, my whole life, had been to love him and be with him, to make him happy. I didn’t want to cause any unhappiness now—in that way, I decided it was probably better than he wasn’t here to see this, though I missed him so much at that moment the ache of it was as bad as the strange pains in my belly.

Hell is the inability to love.

If you love your dad, it’s tough when he dies. If you don’t like your dad, it’s tough when he dies. Because you lose that guy. Whatever you didn’t get, you miss. And what you did get, you miss.

The Tiger Rising is, again, about a motherless child. His name is Rob Horton. He is dealing with the death of his mother, when he and his father move to a new town. And two things happen the same day that Rob gets sent home. One is he meets a girl named Sistine Bailey, who is what my mother would call "a piece of work," and he finds a real tiger in a cage in the woods behind the motel where he lives with his dad. And that's the story: what happens with the Sistine tiger, the real tiger and Rob's grief.

Any love involves loss, and that's the risk you take. And the greater the love, the greater the loss. I certainly feel that now with the woman I'm with, and the children that I have. But whatever the course may be, this time together is extraordinary.

We all miss you so much. It just never ends. It feels like we were all wounded in your battle, Caroline. I miss you. I love you.

In my childhood diary I wrote: “I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much.

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

Many of the twisted minds and crippled characters in the world were made by careless parents who kept their children away from knives and fires, but put permanent scars on their souls.

When a person that one loves is in the world and alive and well, and pleased to be in the world, then to miss them is only a new flavor, a salt sharpness in experience. It is when the beloved is unhappy or maimed or troubled that one misses with pain.

I think love is one of those things that it's only really bad because it was once good. You can't miss something that was never amazing. So, what I've learned is that even if it ends badly, it's worth it if it made you feel something, if it taught you something.

I don't know what to say, except I love Ryan Dunn and I'm really going to miss him.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing. Which is why, when it happened, it hurt so badly.

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

My wife never look at me anymore, my children, my wife ... we only die once in our life. I'm dying every day when I get up in the morning.