Flannery O'Connor famous quotes

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Catholic #Grace #Human Nature

I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Inspiring #Writing #Thinking

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Funny #Truth #Humorous

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Funny #Life #Change

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#People #Suffering #Christ

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Struggle #World #Cherish

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. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Writing #Would Be #Fiction

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Dark #Night #Soul

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Sweet #Women #Believe

[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

#Humility #Self #Way

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

#Writing #Southern #Able

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

#Thinking #People #Religion

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 upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Christian #Fall #Thinking

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Artist #Strangeness

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Southern #Childhood #Lasts

If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Past #Remember #Forget

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Dark #Night #Long

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Life #Happiness #Success

A God you understood would be less than yourself.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Would Be #Understood

Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Writing #Character #Ideas

On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think...of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Sex #Thinking #Class

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

#Life #Fall #Writing

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

#Looks #Fiction #Garbage

...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

#Believe #Struggle #Suffering

A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Devil #Wells #Resisting

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Self Esteem #Independence #Right Now

Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Writing #Nuts #Piano

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

#Mean #Talking #Vision

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

#Work Out #Would Be #Pay

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Two #Southern #Quality

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.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Fall #Writing #Stories

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

#Ocean #Fall #Thinking

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Burden #Retention

I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Christian #Spiritual #Mean

In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Thinking #Europe #Long

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Faith #Believe #Literature

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

#Humorous #Credit #Tongue

In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Real #Character #Personality

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

#Writing #Long #People

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.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Reading #Writing #Grace

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

#Gone #Where You Come #Where You Are

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

#Levels #Absolutes #Relative

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle 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

#Education #Teacher #Women

We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Mean #Use #Lord

You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Attention #Reader #Knows

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Believe #Thinking #Doubt

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

#Life #Views #Too Much

We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. 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. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Taken #College #Childhood

I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Eye #Blessing #I Can

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#People #Dumb #Needs

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

#Integrity #Intellectual #Mind

Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Morning #Ideas #Doe

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

#Teacher #Writing #School

Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Charity #Demand #Remember

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

#Law #Soul #Church

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Writing #Overcoming #Half

I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Christian #Sarcastic #Reading

Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Sides #Belief #Secure

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Saint #Martyr #Ifs

Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Faith #Selfish #Order

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

#Real #Reflection #Expression

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

#Reading #Writing #Blow

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

#Pain #Effectiveness #Suffering

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Experience #Conviction #Harshness

I love a lot of people, understand none of them.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#People

It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Real #People #Watches

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

#Country #Father #Past

Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Children #Speed #Mercy

Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Mean #Church #Doe

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

#Real #Responsibility #Use

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

#Light #Belief #Substitutes

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Doctrine #Way #Dogma

I'm a full-time believer in writing habits...You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows awayOf course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that's all the energy I have, but I don't let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Writing #Blow #Two

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

#Thinking #Firsts #Honest

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

#Thinking #Personality #Catholic

I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Advice #Handy #Following

The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Experience #Humans #Limitation

Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Sickness #Company

To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Hearing #Blind #Figures

I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Atheist #Catholic #Would Be

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Down And #Hunts #Ifs

Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Children #Age #Firsts

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

#Life #Good Woman #Misfits

Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Believe #Giving #Catholic

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Confusing #Quitting #Madness

There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling about in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Believe #Journey #Emotion

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

#Smart #Book #Criticism

Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Principles #Politics #Policy

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

#Writing #Fiction #Get Away

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

#Life #Spiritual #Lost

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

#Irritation #Literature #Emotion

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Rome #Done #Literature

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

#Christian #Believe #Writing

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

#Art #Creativity #Effort

You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Stories #Able #Ought

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

#Thinking #Safe #Christ

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Writing #Stories #Rubbish

When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Stories #States #Theme

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
-- Flannery O'Connor

#Writing #Deals

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

#August #Church #Operations