Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories and they will figure out how those stories apply to them.

I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

I don't think I'd change the path that's got me where I am today.

Every country I go to, I learn a little bit more about myself.

A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.

I am drawn to characters that go on journeys, characters that are real people, that have life.

As I've gotten older and my life is a lot more stable, I've gotten more into storytelling.

A certain point came when I wanted to document growing-up adventures.

I think you just learn so much about yourself over the years.

I don't want to just tell my story - I want to share the experiences, life lessons, and values that have shaped who I am and my ideas for the future.

My past has helped me grow as a person.

When I think back on it, it's amazing what happens to us as we move out into the world.

Every year you learn as a person, about yourself, what works for you and what doesn't.

With age and experience, I started to know myself better.

I had to have experience, you know what I mean? Because I've been doing this since I was 14... I couldn't write about anything at 14. I had to live some life. I definitely lived some life.

Our bad memories and our bad experiences are what make us who we are and what make us grow and allow us to learn, if we choose to see the lessons in those experiences.

I felt like I had experienced a lot of things in the first chapter of my life, and I wanted it to inspire and motivate people, so I just started writing.

Experience is the only real teacher and if you keep a diary you get three bites at educating yourself - when it happens, when you write it down, and when you reread it and realise you were wrong. Making mistakes is part of life. The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn't believed in order to get on. Some politicians do do that.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

I often learn more about myself from listening to the life story of a friend than I do reflecting on my own story.

The older you get, you always learn more. Sometimes it's a process of learning about yourself and what your journey is. Sometimes the process moves forward at a rapid pace in a short amount of time - or moves backwards. And you're like, "Man, I thought I had made so much progress, and now all of a sudden, I'm 10 steps further behind than when I started."

You can get spiritual things out of books and stories and they have nothing to do with religion.

I've done a lot of growing up and realized a lot of things.

Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.