Flannery O'Connor Quotes
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint.
I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.
The Bible was the only book he read. He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.
No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.
I have almost no capacity for worship. What I have is the knowledge that it is my duty to worship and worship only what I believe to be true.” May 19, 1962
My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.
One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.
... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.
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.
When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.
It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all.
She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.
I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.
He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.
...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.
Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.
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.
Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.
There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.
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...
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.
She would've been a good woman, " said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.
The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.
No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist.
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.
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 world was made for the dead. Think of all the dead there are...There's a million times more dead than living and the dead are dead a million times longer than the living are alive...
When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle.
Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.
My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.
The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.
When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.