Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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.
O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969, p. 48.
To her view evil was not a great force to be contended with and defeated, but it emanates from the accumulation little things that people do and do not do within a culture. There is no devil or anti-Christ. There is just all of us.
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
