Flannery O'Connor Quotes & Sayings

If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference. — Flannery O'Connor

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled. — 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 believe the teacher's work is largely negative, that it is largely a matter of saying, "This doesn't work because ... " or "This does work because ... " The because is very important. The teacher can help you understand the nature of your medium, and he can guide you in your reading. — 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

I am going to be the World Authority on Peafowl, and I hope to be offered a chair some day at the Chicken College. — Flannery O'Connor

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

Give me the grace to be impatient for the time when I shall see You face to face and need no stimulus than that to adore You. — Flannery O'Connor

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them. — Flannery O'Connor

Nothing is like it used to be, lady," he said. "The world is almost rotten. — Flannery O'Connor

Remember what you won't get if you don't mind, her grandfather remarked. — Flannery O'Connor

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

Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part. — Flannery O'Connor

The straightforward manner is seldom equal to the complications of the good subject. There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention. — Flannery O'Connor

A cloud, the exact color of the boy's hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him. — Flannery O'Connor

Thomas had inherited his father's reason without his ruthlessness and his mother's love of good without her tendency to pursue it. His plan for all practical action was to wait and see what developed. — Flannery O'Connor

It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth. — Flannery O'Connor

I come a long way since I would believe anything. I come halfway around the world. — Flannery O'Connor

Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience. — Flannery O'Connor

He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customers' families and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote 'cancer' after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word 'cancer' and wrote 'dead' there. "And I say thank God when they're dead," the salesman said; "that's one less to remember. — Flannery O'Connor

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. — 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

The thing for you to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well. — Flannery O'Connor

Christianity is a strangely cheery religion. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape cam from the hand of Providence. — Flannery O'Connor

My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup. — 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

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence. — Flannery O'Connor

The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets. Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. — Flannery O'Connor

I couldn't make any judgment on the Summa, except to say this: I read it for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed. If my mother were to come in during this process and say, 'Turn off that light. It's late,' I with a lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression, would reply, 'On the contrary, I answer that the light, being eternal and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes,' or some such thing. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

I believe firmly in mystery and manners. — Flannery O'Connor

The writer who position is Christian, and probably also the writer whose position is not, will begin to wonder at this point if there could not be some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joy of life. He may at least be permitted to ask if these screams for joy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperous society. — 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

She didn't like to admit it about her own kin, least about her own brother, but there he was - good for absolutely nothing. — Flannery O'Connor

[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

Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it. — Flannery O'Connor

The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it. — 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

He had measured five feet four inches of pure gamecock. — Flannery O'Connor

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity. — Flannery O'Connor

I don't have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else. — 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

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

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

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

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

Jesus died to redeem you," she said.
"I never ast him," he muttered. — Flannery O'Connor

The meaning of the story is the story. — Flannery O'Connor

No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist. The devil is the greatest believer and he has his reasons. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

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

She appeared to adore Thomas's repugnance to her and to draw it out of him every chance she got as if it added delectably to her martyrdom. — Flannery O'Connor

Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip. — Flannery O'Connor

There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy. — Flannery O'Connor

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

The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience. — Flannery O'Connor

As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head. — Flannery O'Connor

The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee. Bailey — 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

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

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

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots. — Flannery O'Connor

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

It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all. — Flannery O'Connor

Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it. — Flannery O'Connor

The only way to the truth is through blasphemy. — Flannery O'Connor

People without hope do not write novels ... [Writing fiction] is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal. — Flannery O'Connor

Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God! — Flannery O'Connor

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

Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

Symbols are something [the writer] uses simply as a matter of course. You might say that theses are details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction ... the truer the symbol, the deeper it leads you, the more meaning it opens up — Flannery O'Connor

The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment. — Flannery O'Connor

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial. — Flannery O'Connor

The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility. — Flannery O'Connor

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

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

Kindness and patience were always called for ... — Flannery O'Connor

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

It's no part of your job to think for the Lord," his great-uncle said. "Judgment may rack your bones. — Flannery O'Connor

Sitting with him was like sitting by yourself; he didn't talk except when it suited him. You asked him a question in the morning and he might answer in the afternoon, or he might never. — Flannery O'Connor

The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning. — Flannery O'Connor

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live. — 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 old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree. — Flannery O'Connor

I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why. — Flannery O'Connor

The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them. — Flannery O'Connor

I don't believe in classes where students criticize each other's manuscripts. Such criticism is generally composed in equal parts of ignorance, flattery, and spite. It's the blind leading the blind, and it can be dangerous. A teacher who tries to impose a way of writing on you can be dangerous, too. — Flannery O'Connor

The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable. — Flannery O'Connor