Flannery O'Connor Quotes

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

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

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

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.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure 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.

[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 . . .

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

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

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

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

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.

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

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

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

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.

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

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.

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

Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

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

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

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

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

Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.

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

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.

Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.

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

The only way to the truth is through blasphemy.

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.

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

I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.

If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.

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.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

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

It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.

Unadaptability is often a virtue.