People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
Flannery O'ConnorDogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
Flannery O'ConnorPurity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
Flannery O'ConnorHe knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be one of the supreme moments in life but apart from that, he didn't have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.
Flannery O'ConnorWhen you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
Flannery O'ConnorFor me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.
Flannery O'Connor