Flannery O'Connor citations

“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…”

“Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.”

“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 write to discover what I know.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”