Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never 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... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

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

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.

Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.

The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.

He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery...

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

Besides the neutral expression she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Knowing who you are is good for one generation only.