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Quoth Flannery O'Connor

By AdamSmith, in Theater, Movies, Art and Literature

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“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― 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, The Habit of Being: Letters of 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, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“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, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
“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, Wise Blood
“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”
― 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, 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...”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
tags: love
“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of 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
“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”
― 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, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of 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
“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― 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
“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― 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, The Complete Stories
“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“I love a lot of people, understand none of them...”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other 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.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child's faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

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. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you fell you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of 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
“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“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, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”
― 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, 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.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
― 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, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”
― 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, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“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.

Nothing outside you can give you any place," he said. "You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters
“Conviction without experience makes for harshness. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Grace changes us and change is painful".”
― 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, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“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, Wise Blood
“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, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
“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
“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
“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, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“The life you save may very well be your own.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“She was a talker, wasn't she?" Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.

"Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
“Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.

Her response was, “If it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. ”
― Flannery O'Connor
“We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood / The Violent Bear It Away / The Complete Stories
“Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“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”
― Flannery O'Connor
“In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite”
― Flannery O'Connor
“People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.
”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“[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 . . .”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it. ”
― 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!”
― 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, Wise Blood
“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.”
― 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, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“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. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery...”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of 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, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories…. What kept me a skeptic [of secularism] in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read. If you want your faith, you have to work for it…. Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
“When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
“Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you’re not a lady? she says.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity...”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read. I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“He knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be one of the supreme moments in life but apart from that, he didn't have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“[simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness and when the time came for him to lose his balance he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away
“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 Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint...”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories
“Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Behind the newspaper Julian was withdrawing into the inner compartment of his mind where he spent most of his time. This was a kind of mental bubble in which he established himself when he could not bear to be a part of what was going on around him. From it he could see out and judge but in it he was safe from any kind of penetration from without. It was the only place where he felt free of the general idiocy of his fellows. His mother had never entered it but from it he could see her with absolute clarity.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. 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...”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories
“I must tell you how I work. I don't have my novel outlined and 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 over again.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would never be a saint.... but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
“Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, "Who speaks for America today?" will have to be: the advertising agencies. They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and our almost classless society, and no one has ever accused them of not being affirmative. Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for assurance. Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is , as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

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“I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories
“I don’t really think the standard of judgment, the missing link, you spoke of that you find in my stories emerges from any religion but Christianity, because it concerns specifically Christ and the Incarnation, the fact that there has been a unique intervention in history. It’s not a matter in these stories of Do Unto Others. That can be found in any ethical cultural series. It is the fact of the Word made flesh.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“You do not write the best you can for the sake of art, but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God to use or not use as he sees fit.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy’s breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away
“Leave!’ Hazel Motes cried. ‘Go ahead and leave! The truth don’t matter to you. Listen,’ he said, pointing his finger at the rest of them, ‘the truth don’t matter to you. If Jesus had redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? You wouldn’t do nothing about it. Your faces wouldn’t move, neither this way nor that, and if it was three crosses there and Him hung on the middle one, that wouldn’t mean no more to you and me than the other two. Listen here. What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don’t have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that’s all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don’t look like any other man so you’ll look at him. Give me such a jesus, you people. Give me such a new jesus and you’ll see how far the Church Without Christ can go!”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“The virtue of hope, in Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories
“You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
“Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“[Writing about her address to a ladies club]: The heart of my message to them was that they would all fry in Hell if they didn't quit reading trash.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Most things are beyond me," Block said. "I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood,”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary in spite of his opinion.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“When I think of all I have to be thankful for I wonder that You just don't kill me now because You've done so much for me already & I haven't been particularly grateful.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal
“Man's desire for God is bedded in his unconscious & seeks to satisfy itself in physical possession of another human. This necessarily is a passing, fading attachment in its sensuous aspects since it is a poor substitute for what the unconscious is after.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal
“She could not make up her mind what would be inside his head and what out. She thought of her own head as a switchbox where she controlled from; but with him, she could only imagine the outside in, the whole black world in his head and his head bigger than the world, his head big enough to include the sky and planets and whatever was or had been or would be.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“I can smell the sin on your breath.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“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 Habit of Being: Letters of 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
“...what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Wise Blood has reached the age of ten and is still alive. My critical powers are just sufficient to determine this, and I am gratified to be able to say it. The book was written with zest and, if possible, it should be read that way. It is a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death. 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 some readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them, Hazel Motes's 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 do so. 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.

(Preface to second edition, 1962)”
― Flannery O'Connor, 3 by Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Bear It Away / Everything That Rises Must Converge / Wise Blood
“Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Listen, friends," said the disciple confidently, " [...] I didn't have a friend in the world. Do you know what it's like not to have a friend in the world?"
"It ain't no worsen havinum that would put a knife in your back when you wasn't looking," the older man said, barely parting his lips.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
“Some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn't kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up. He stepped down and greeted her.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
“I have tried imagining that the single peacock I see before me is the only one I have, but then one comes to join him, another flies off the roof, four or five crash out of the crepe-myrtle hedge; from the pond one screams and from the barn I hear the dairyman denouncing another that has got into the cow-feed. My kin are given to such phrases as, 'Let's face it.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn’t write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, a total experience of human nature at any time.

For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage, he sees it not as a sickness or an accident of the environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future. Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy.

Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe. One reason a great deal of our contemporary fictions is humorless is because so many of these writers are relativists and have to be continually justifying the actions of their characters on a sliding scale of values.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
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MsGuy Grand Master

MsGuy

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Good Lord, AS, go ahead and get your damned self saved already. You know you're going to up and do it eventually, so just get it over with.

Besides, you might have a real chance to get into Hito's pants afterwards. ;)

All things are possible in Christ. :P

AdamSmith Grand Master

AdamSmith

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Working on it. As you recognize.

Meanwhile the other strain in her wisecracks sustains me...

Whenever Im asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.

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

Etc.

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