Quotes from Flannery O'Connor

It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.

Its face was like the face she had seen in some medieval paintings where the martyr's limbs are being sawed off and his expression says he is being deprived of nothing essential.

The first product of self-knowledge is humility.

People without hope do not write novels … [Writing fiction] is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal.

I am largely worried about wingless chickens. I feel this is the time for me to fulfill myself by stepping in and saving the chicken but I don't know how exactly since I am not bold. I only know I believe in the complete chicken. You think about the complete chicken for a while.

Dear God please give me some place, no matter how small, but let me know it and keep it. If I am the one to wash the second step everyday, let me know it and let me wash it and let my heart overflow with love washing it.

My mamma and I have interesting literary discussions like the following which took place over some Modern Library books that I had just ordered: SHE: "Mobby Dick. I've always heard about that." ME: "Mow-by Dick." SHE: "Mow-by Dick. The Idiot. You would get something called Idiot. What's it about?" ME: "An idiot.

This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.

You can't just say NO, he said. You got to do NO. You got to show it. You got to show you mean it by doing it. You got to show you're not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to make an end of it. One way or another.

In short, I am amenable to criticism, but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not pretend to do otherwise.

Nothing is like it used to be, lady," he said. "The world is almost rotten.

I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually—like this today. The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle.

Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of Wise Blood that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant . . .

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

I have 50 or 60 pages on the [new] novel but I still expect to be a long time at it. It's a theme that requires prayer and fasting to make it get anywhere. I manage to pray but am a very sloppy faster.

With the energy he had conserved yesterday letting her dress him, he had written a note and pinned it in his pocket. IF FOUND DEAD SHIP EXPRESS COLLECT TO COLEMAN PARRUM, CORINTH, GEORGIA. Under this he had continued: COLEMAN SELL MY BELONGINGS AND PAY THE FREIGHT ON ME & THE UNDERTAKER. ANYTHING LEFT OVER YOU CAN KEEP. YOURS TRULY T. C. TANNER. P.S. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. DON'T LET THEM TALK YOU INTO COMING UP HERE. ITS NO KIND OF PLACE.

I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out of the way it went in.

There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.

The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.

Most things are beyond me, Block said. I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood

The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside his community seldom has such a problem.

Jesus died to redeem you, she said. I never ast him, he muttered.

He kept on digging but the grave did not get any deeper. "The dead are poor," he said in the voice of the stranger. You can't be any poorer than dead.

His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it.