Lhasa Kivan > Lhasa's Quotes

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“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, Wise Blood

“She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would never be a saint.... but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I can smell the sin on your breath.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“When shall we live if not now?”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“First we eat, then we do everything else.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.”
― M.F.K. Fisher

“...for me there is too little of life to spend most of it forcing myself into detachment from it.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

“There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.”
― M.F.K. Fisher