Flannery O'Connor Quotes

I don't remember my childhood very well for one reason or another, possibly childhood trauma or possibly just a very bad memory. My early life has sort of been erased from my memory banks.

I only remember the end of my dreams, like waking up at a steering wheel, or falling.

I absolutely do not think that I have even a vague recollection of what normal life is like.

Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.

I remember one night in Memphis, I'd come out of a blackout, and I didn't know where I was. I'm feeling through the darkness - I was asleep in the middle of a freeway. I went up to this car in the darkness, and it was a cop car.

I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.

If she possessed any memory whatsoever of the days when she'd been whole, her shattered recollections were scattered across the darkscape of her mind in fragments so minuscule that she could no more easily piece them together than she could gather from the beach all the tiny chips of broken seashells, worn to polished flakes by ages of relentless tides, and reassemble them into their original architectures.

Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.

I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

I live in the borderlands. The word ghost sounds like memory. The word therapy means exorcism. My visions echo and multiplymultiply. I don't know how to figure out what they mean. I can't tell where they start or if they will end. But I know this. If they shrink my head any more, or float me away on an ocean of pills, I will never return.

I understood we used to be close. But they were like books i'd read two summer ago; I knew I'd liked them, but I couldn't tell you now what they'd been about.

I don't even know my own phone number.

My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. “Hold tight,” I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget.

How had I managed to tie my boots? I didn’t even remember getting dressed. I was out here in public at the mall. What was I wearing? Jeans. I could feel socks. I had my boots on. I plucked at the edge of my t-shirt and saw it was red. I was wearing Dad’s spare Army jacket, and there was a heavy weight in the right pocket that had to be something deadly.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

Just wondering why I feel so all alone, why I'm a stranger in my own?

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

I feel kind of depressed today... Do you ever have the feeling that life has passed you by? Worse than that... Sometimes I think life and I are going in opposite directions!

I feel like the world stopped. And I got off...and then it started spinning again, but too fast for me to hop back on. I feel like I'm still trying to get a...to get some kind of foothold on living

They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again: "Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

She understood how a world jammed with phones, email, and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone.

I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But i couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle. I was supposed to breathe life into that dead spot, but it hadn't worked.

I don't know. Sometimes, I feel nothing, and I'm so afraid. Afraid I'll stop feeling anything at all. I'll just slip away inside myself...I just need to feel something" A Great and Terrible Beauty, Page 177, by