Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

The trouble with the world was that nobody stopped or took any care.

For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

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.

I write to discover what I know

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.

The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.

Some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation.

Having been a Protestant, you may have the feeling that you must feel you believe; perhaps feeling belief is not always an illusion but I imagine it is most of the time; but I can understand the feeling of pain on going to Communion and it seems a more reliable feeling than joy. Do you know the Hopkins-Bridges correspondence? Bridges wrote Hopkins at one point and asked him how he could possibly learn to believe, expecting, I suppose, a metaphysical answer. Hopkins only said, "Give alms.

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

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.

Any criticism at all which depresses you to the extent that you feel you cannot ever write anything worth anything is from the Devil and to subject yourself to it is for you an occasion of sin. In you the talent is there and you are expected to use it. Whether the work itself is completely successful, or whether you ever get any worldly success out of it, is a matter of no concern to you. It is like the Japanese swordsmen who are indifferent to getting slain in the duel.

She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn't have the brains to avoid evil without it.

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.

You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.

Lady,' The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the wood, 'there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.

Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a great empty drum of flesh

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

People only make us lonelier by reminding us of God.

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.

The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorr.

The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder. Our plans were so beautifully laid out, ready to be carried to action, but with magnificent certainty God laid them aside and said, You have forgotten - Mine? A meditation on her fathers death.

I hope you understand that it is not the tooth of the saber-toothed tiger I want, it is the tiger . I don't care if it's a old toothless tiger or not, just so it's alive. I intend to start a zoo.

I have a one-legged friend and I asked her what they said to John at the gate. She said she reckoned they said, "The lame shall enter first." This may be because the lame will be able to knock everybody else aside with their crutches.

What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.