Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Flannery O'Connor Quotes

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.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.

It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.

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...

She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

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.

You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!

When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.

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

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.

He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.'

'What you got on it?' the girl said.

'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.'

'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.

She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.

The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.

I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.

If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.

I don’t have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.

My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.

When we get our spiritual house in order, we'll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don't expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.

When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle.

It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming.

I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

When 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.

I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.

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