Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

Vi är allesammans fördömda, sa hon, men somliga av oss har tagit av oss ögonbindlarna och sett att inget finns att se. Det är en slags frälsning.

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.

He didn't have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again. To his mind, history was connected with processions and life with parades and he liked parades.

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

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.

My dear God, I am impressed with how much I have to be thankful for in a material sense; and in a spiritual sense I have the opportunity of being even more fortunate. But it seems apparent to me that I am not translating this opportunity into fact.

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

Do you think, Mr. Motes," she said hoarsely, "that when you're dead, you're blind?" "I hope so," he said after a minute. "Why?" she asked, staring at him. After a while he said, "If there's no bottom in your eyes, they hold more." The

You found out more when you left where you lived. He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ.

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.

You remain what you are. - Everything That Rises Must Converge

His thoughts were heavy as if they had to struggle up through some dense medium to reach the surface of his mind.

We're all damned, she said, "but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation.

A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens. He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do.

He was bald-headed except for a little fringe of rust-colored hair and his face was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like them with ruts and gullys.

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.

If they here, they somewhere.

Every time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley's imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil's experiment station.

When he was four years old, his father had brought him home a tin box from the penitentiary. It was orange and had a picture of some peanut brittle on the outside of it and green letters that said, "A NUTTY SURPRISE!" When Enoch had opened it, a coiled piece of steel had sprung out at him and broken off the ends of his two front teeth. His life was full of so many happenings like that that it would seem he should have been more sensitive to his times of danger.

Mr. Head turned slowly. He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation.

All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didn't like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.

The fact is that if the writer's attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole.

The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain.

Anyone who has lived to the age of eighteen has enough stories to last a lifetime.