Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn't know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn't even smell like smoke.

But this too is true: stories can save us.

The message of Jesus is summed up partly in the Sermon on the Mount, and partly when he begins his ministry and quotes the passage from Isaiah: 'I have come to set free the prisoners and restore sight to the blind.' And certainly, his mission is also to bring hope. It was to heal people, to befriend the outcast.

There is and must be a remedy for all Evils.

We came into a broken world. And we're the cleanup crew.

Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

God is a specialist at making something useful and beautiful out of something broken and confused.

If a piece of knotted string can unleash the wind, and if a drowned man can awaken, then I believe a broken man can heal.

Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises.

Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.

God will make right all that is wrong, He will take away the lingering effect of sin and what's not right in our lives. He knows how painful life in this world can be.

Without forgiveness, there's no future.

When readers close the covers on 'Running the Rift,' I want them to understand that it is not a genocide novel but rather a story of hope and rebirth.

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

The city's contradictions and frailties drive me to the church. The church, in turn, binds my wounds and soothes my troubled heart, and sends me right back out into the city again.

I just hope people see that if God can do something beautiful with my broken pieces, then God truly has a plan for each and everyone of us.

Rwanda can be a paradise again, but it will take the love of the entire world to heal my homeland. And that's as it should be, for what happened in Rwanda happened to us all - humanity was wounded by the genocide.

Sin and forgiveness and falling and getting back up and losing the pearl of great price in the couch cushions but then finding it again, and again, and again? Those are the stumbling steps to becoming Real, the only script that's really worth following in this world or the one that's coming.

I don't know how much I believe in redemptive stories, even though people want them and strive for them.

We've all fallen, but at the same time we're not broken. There is the hint that we are going to get up again.

But I'm going to focus on salvation as well as physical healing.

Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of the creation. It makes history possible.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.

Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories.

I've learned that when God promises beauty through the ashes, He means it.