quotes by Flannery O'Connor

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. "
— Flannery O'Connor

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. "
— Flannery O'Connor

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

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

"She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
— Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories)

"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. "
— Flannery O'Connor

"I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor)

"He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.'

'What you got on it?' the girl said.

'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.'

'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Complete Stories)

""Anybody who has survived
his childhood has enough
information about life to
last him the rest of his days."


"
— Flannery O'Connor

"Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."
— Flannery O'Connor

"The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Complete Stories)

"The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements
for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development."
— Flannery O'Connor

"
"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd."

~ Flannery O'Connor"
— Flannery O'Connor (Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America))

"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"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..."
— Flannery O'Connor (Everything That Rises Must Converge)

"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now."
— Flannery O'Connor

"It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack."
— Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories)

""The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.""
— Flannery O'Connor

"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."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor)