Flannery O’Connor Quotes

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”

“The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity…”

“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 come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”

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

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

“Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.

Her response was, “If it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.”

“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.”

“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”

“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.”

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

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

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

“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”

“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.”

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

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

“Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.”

“Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.”

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

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

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”

“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.”

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

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it”

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

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

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”

“Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”

“If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.”

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”

“In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”

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

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

“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…”

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”

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

“There are all kinds of truth… but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”

“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

“Grace changes us and change is painful".”

“The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”

“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.”

“To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility…”

“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

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

“Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.”

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

“I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.”

“Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.”

“Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.”

“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”

“Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.”

“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.”