Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

His heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton.

Enoch Emery had borrowed his landlady's umbrella and he discovered as he stood in the entrance of the drugstore, trying to open it, that it was at least as old as she was. When he finally got it hoisted, he pushed his dark glasses back on his eyes and re-entered the downpour.

He had measured five feet four inches of pure gamecock.

what you call my struggle to submit, which is not a struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy – – fully armed too as it's a highly dangerous quest

El camino a la desesperación es renunciar a cualquier tipo de experiencia.

You got a least knowledge, the blind man said. That's enough. You know His name and you're marked. If Jesus has marked you there ain't nothing you can do about it. Them that have knowledge can't swap it for ignorance.

True culture is in the mind, the mind," he said, and tapped his head, "the mind." "It's in the heart," she said, "and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are." "Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are." "I care who I am," she said icily.

I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord. Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.

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

You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else," he said, "but you ain't! I'm the one has it. Not you. Me." Haze didn't say anything. He stood there for an instant, small in the

He wondered if she walked at night and came there ever—came with that look on her face, unrested and looking, going up the path and through the barn open all around and stopping in the shadow by the store boarded up, coming on unrested with that look on her face like he had seen through the crack going down.

Will you for God's sake get off that subject?" Julian said. When he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for his mother's sins.

We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

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

Nothing needs to happen to a writer's life after they are 20. By then they've experienced more than enough to last their creative life.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.

the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.

In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite

If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.