Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity...

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.

Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace.

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.

So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.

When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.

She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.