Authors — Quotes

Flannery O'Connor Quotes: 32

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
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.
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.
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
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.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.
Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters
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.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
She would've been a good woman,"said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
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.
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.
The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.
The Complete Stories
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...
Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories
Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
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.
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 Complete Stories
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.
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.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
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.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
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.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
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.
Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories
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.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”(August 9, 1955)
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.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.
A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
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!
The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.
The Violent Bear it Away