Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

Lemme tell you something: there ain't any place in the world for a poor disabled friendless drifting man." The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet's head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree. He didn't answer at once. He rolled himself

My advice to all parents is beat your children moderately and moderately often; and anything that Wm. Heard Kilpatrick & Jhn. Dewey say do, don't do Ã¢â'¬Â¦

The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don't hold nothing back.

I call myself The Misfit, he said, because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment. Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard To Find

No pleasure but meanness

In spite of himself, Enoch couldn't get over the expectation that the new jesus was going to do something for him in return for his services. This was the virtue of Hope, which was made up, in Enoch, of two parts suspicion and one part lust.

His home was to him home, workshop, church, as personal as the shell of a turtle and as necessary.

After a while he said, If there's no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.

The novelist's job is to] make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible.

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

The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say, "My daughter is a nurse," or "My daughter is a school teacher," or even, "My daughter is a chemical engineer." You could not say, "My daughter is a philosopher." That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans

Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance that extended from his eyes to blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space.

He didn't have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again.

The houses were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of grass in front of it like a dog gripping a stolen steak.

Anyone who has survived childhood, has enough material to write for the last of her life.

Anyone who has survived childhood, has enough material to write for the rest of her life.

Habría sido una buena mujer -dijo el Desequilibrado- si hubiese tenío a alguien cerca que le disparara cada minuto de su vida.

The body, lady, is like a house: it don't go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always...

Je ne me battrais pas pour chaque mot tombé de ma bouche, mais il y a des tas de choses dont je ne parviens pas à parler et pour lesquelles je me battrais.

You do not write the best you can for the sake of art but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God, to use or not use as He sees fit.

No. No. It couldn't be any baby. She was not going to have something waiting in her to make her deader, she was not.

But there are times when the sharpest suffering is not to suffer and the worse affliction not to be afflicted.

i write because i don't know what i think until i read what i say

Parker had never before felt the least motion of wonder in himself. Until he saw the man at the fair, it did not enter his head that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed. Even then it did not enter his head, but a peculiar unease settled in him. It was as if a blind boy had been turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had been changed.