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.
Interpretation
Childhood experiences provide valuable life lessons that can guide us throughout our lives.
This quote by Flannery O'Connor suggests that the challenges and experiences faced during childhood equip individuals with essential knowledge about life. If one cannot learn and grow from the small experiences of youth, it is unlikely that they will cope effectively with the more significant challenges that come later in life.
In practice
During a motivational speech about perseverance in life.
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
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.
There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.
One should never make one's entrance with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong, and I would do it this way,' but the greatest dissents do become court opinions.
The miser is as much in want of what he has as of what he has not.
The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.
I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. we must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.
I certainly have a lot to lament, as do we all, everybody has their griefs. But the griefs we can fix, shouldn't we go around fixing them?
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