Flannery O'Connor Quotes About Church

Quotes about: Church

• If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Fighting, Nihilism, Church

  "This Lonesome Place" by Hilton Als, www.newyorker.com. January 29, 2001.

• The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” (August 9, 1955)

  Flannery O'Connor

  August, Church, Operations

• ...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Believe, Struggle, Suffering

• If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Believe, Differences, Catholic

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.103, Macmillan

• I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Church, Lame, Way

  Flannery O'Connor (1983). “Three by Flannery O'Connor: Wise blood, The violent bear it away, Everything that rises must converge”, Signet Classics

• For 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

  Law, Soul, Church

• I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Heart, Thinking

• When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Real, Men, Sight

• Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Mean, Church, Doe

• You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Pain, Effectiveness, Suffering

• It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Rain, Two, Church

  Flannery O'Connor (2015). “Wise Blood”, p.46, Faber & Faber

• The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Spiritual, Children, Father

• The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery; that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Christian, Catholic, Mind

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.146, Macmillan

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