Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

Sin is a great thing as long as it's recognized. It leads a good many people to God who wouldn't get there otherwise.

Dissatisfaction began to grow so great in Parker that there was no containing it outside of a tattoo. It had to be his back. There was no help for it. A dim half-formed inspiration began to work in his mind. He visualized having a tattoo put there that Sarah Ruth would not be able to resist—a religious subject.

Parker had an extra sense that told him when there was a woman nearby watching him.

There a series of Catholic rituals and teachings had offered her young life a coherent universe. By 1946, Savannah had for O'Connor ceded to the university world of Iowa, where new influences, including intellectual joys, brought with them questions and skepticism.

She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody to shoot her every day of her life.

Two people can remain 'in love'—a phrase made practically useless by stinking romanticism—only if their common desire for each other unites in a greater desire for God—i.e., they do not become satisfied but more desirous together of the supernatural love in union with God.

Two things I can't stand, Haze said, ---a man that ain't true and one that mocks what is.

I come a long way since I would believe anything. I come halfway around the world.

they were all, if the truth was only known, a little bit off in their heads. What possible reason could a sane person have for wanting to not enjoy himself any more?

Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look.

She was so mad she burned the corn bread three days in a row

No," he said. Then he drew breath and said, "You got a nice place here. It's a nice part of the country. I'm sorry if I've give you a lot of trouble getting sick. It was my fault trying to be friendly with that nigger." And I'm a damned liar besides, he said to himself to kill the outrageous taste such a statement made in his mouth.

He couldn't understand at all why he had let himself risk his skin for a dead shriveled-up part-nigger dwarf that had never done anything but get himself embalmed and then lain stinking in a museum the rest of his life.

He don't know it's anything he can't know, the old man said. That's his trouble. He thinks if it's something he can't know then somebody smarter than him can tell him about it and he can know it just the same. And if you were to go there, the first thing he would do would be to test your head and tell you what you were thinking and howcome you were thinking it and what you ought to be thinking instead. And before long you wouldn't belong to your self no more, you would belong to him.

If I even do get to be a fine writer it will not be because I am a fine writer, but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so as far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not. The Christian writer particularly will feel that whatever his initial gift is, it comes from God; and no matter how minor a gift it is, he will not be willing to destroy it by trying to use it outside its proper limits.

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

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.

And she said such strange things! To her own mother she had said—without warning "Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!" she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, "Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!

Only art could make fiction beautiful; only reality could sustain such intense art

Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people.

Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.

The misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with Jesus.