Flannery O'connor Quotes

If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted. Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves—whether they know clearly what it is they act upon or not.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.

~ Flannery O'connor

He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.

~ Flannery O'connor

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

~ Flannery O'connor

[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it.

~ Flannery O'connor

The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don't hold nothing back.

~ Flannery O'connor

It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.

~ Flannery O'connor

Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.

~ Flannery O'connor

Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.

~ Flannery O'connor

Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

~ Flannery O'connor

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

~ Flannery O'connor

He had measured five feet four inches of pure gamecock.

~ Flannery O'connor

I am often told that the model of balance for the novelist should be Dante, who divided his territory up pretty evenly between hell, purgatory, and paradise. There can be no objection to this, but also there can be no reason to assume that the result of doing it in these times will give us the balanced picture it gave in Dante's. Dante lived in the thirteenth century, when that balance was achieved by the faith of his age. We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself.

~ Flannery O'connor

I came from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation.

~ Flannery O'connor

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.

~ Flannery O'connor

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

~ Flannery O'connor

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

~ Flannery O'connor

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.

~ Flannery O'connor

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

~ Flannery O'connor

It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals.

~ Flannery O'connor

For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected.

~ Flannery O'connor

He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation. He didn't care if he never made the train and if it had not been for what suddenly caught his attention, like a cry out of the gathering dusk, he might have forgotten there was a station to go to.

~ Flannery O'connor

In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel's worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.

~ Flannery O'connor

Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.

~ Flannery O'connor

I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing.

~ Flannery O'connor

From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.

~ Flannery O'connor

He had a winning smile and it was evident that he didn't think he was any better than anybody else even though he was.

~ Flannery O'connor

He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.

~ Flannery O'connor

...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.

~ Flannery O'connor

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.

~ Flannery O'connor

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

~ Flannery O'connor

I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway less burdened.

~ Flannery O'connor

The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.

~ Flannery O'connor