Flannery O'connor Quotes

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...

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! 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. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

~ Flannery O'connor

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

It is when the individual's faith is weak, not strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

~ Flannery O'connor

...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.

~ Flannery O'connor

Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. 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. For them Hazel Motes' integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ 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.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

~ Flannery O'connor

The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.

~ Flannery O'connor

I don't know which is worse—to have a bad teacher or no teacher at all. In any case, I believe the teacher's work should be largely negative. He can't put the gift into you, but if he finds it there, he can try to keep it from going in an obviously wrong direction. We can learn how not to write, but this is a discipline that does not simply concern writing itself but concerns the whole intellectual life. A mind cleared of false emotion and false sentiment and egocentricity is going to have at least those roadblocks removed from its path. If you don't think cheaply, then there at least won't be the quality of cheapness in your writing, even though you may not be able to write well. The teacher can try to weed out what is positively bad, and this should be the aim of the whole college. Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn't require his attention.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist.

~ Flannery O'connor

To the person who believes this- as the western world did up until a few centuries ago- this physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source. The artist usually knows this by instinct; his senses, which are used to penetrating the concrete, tell him so. When Conrad said that his aim as an artist was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe, he was speaking with the novelist's surest instinct. The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality. This in no way hinders his perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.

~ Flannery O'connor

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

~ Flannery O'connor