Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

I don't really think the standard of judgment, the missing link, you spoke of that you find in my stories emerges from any religion but Christianity, because it concerns specifically Christ and the Incarnation, the fact that there has been a unique intervention in history. It's not a matter in these stories of Do Unto Others. That can be found in any ethical cultural series. It is the fact of the Word made flesh.

I guess a good man IS hard to find!

Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

I believe firmly in mystery and manners.

We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn't have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. That is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do.

Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn't conceive of any other condition.

what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.

The Bible was the only book he read. He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.

The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.

There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.

Jesus thrown everything off balance.

Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.

The virtue of hope, in Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust.

You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.

My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.

Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog

sitting with him was like sitting by yourself; he didn't talk except when it suited him. You asked him a question in the morning and he might answer in the afternoon, or he might never.

Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven.

You might as well go one place as another, he said. That's all I know.

Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual.

He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise.