Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

She was a talker, wasn't she? Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. She would of been a good woman, The Misfit said, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life. Some fun! Bobby Lee said. Shut up, Bobby Lee, The Misfit said. It's no real pleasure in life.

Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.

A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness and when the time came for him to lose his balance he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.

I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.

Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don't want to have created God to my own image as they're so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don't let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it.

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

In most good stories it is the character's personalty that creates the action of the story.

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.

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

I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming.

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.

I can smell the sin on your breath.

I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.

It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.