Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The Nature and Aim of Fiction

The misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with Jesus. When the army finally let him go, he was pleased to think that he was still uncorrupted. All he wanted was to get back to Eastrod, Tennessee. The black Bible and his mother's glasses were still in the bottom of his duffel bag. He didn't read any book now but he kept the Bible because it had come from home. He kept the glasses in case his vision should ever become dim.

He was four or five.

I sure am sick of the Civil War.

Librarians are the last people you can trust about the inside of books.

It is natural that I should not imagine this. If we could accurately map heaven some of our up-&-coming scientists would begin drawing blueprints for its improvement, and the bourgeois would sell guides 10¢ the copy to all over 65.

It's just like any other city and cities ain't all that complicated." But they were. New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next.

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

She was seeing that her father spent his last years with his own family and not in a decayed boarding house full of old women whose heads jiggled. She was doing her duty. She had brothers and sisters who were not.

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs.

I was born in a wreck and my mothers a whore.

highway after the boy.

At his desk, pen in hand, none was more articulate than Thomas. As soon as he found himself shut into the car with Sarah Ham, terror seized his tongue.

I just know you're a good man, she said desperately. You're not a bit common!

Jesus died to redeem you," she said. "I never ast him," he muttered.

Tell The Reader To Go Jump In The Lake The writer is only free when he can tell the reader to go jump in the lake. You want, of course, to get what you have to show across to him, but whether he likes it or not is no concern of the writer. ~Flannery O'Connor

My heroine already is, and is Hulga.

if you know who you are, you can go anywhere.

Flannery O'Connor considered herself "a very innocent speller." Spelling has therefore been corrected in this transcription of A Prayer Journal, so that the reader is not distracted.

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

His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.

You may not see me again,' he said, '- the way I am.' 'Any way I don't see you will be all right with me,' she said.

True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind.

My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know,' Daddy said, 'it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!