"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)

"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."
— Flannery O'Connor

"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

"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system."
— Flannery O'Connor

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

"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 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)

"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)

"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)

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

"Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe."
— Flannery O'Connor

"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

"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."
— 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

"Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it"
— Flannery O'Connor

"There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is."
— Flannery O'Connor

"I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor)

"All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor)

"Total nonretention has kept my education from being a burden to me."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you."
— Flannery O'Connor

"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)

"I love a lot of people, understand none of them..."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor)

"The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience."
— Flannery O'Connor

"If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you."
— Flannery O'Connor

"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

"There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness."
— Flannery O'Connor

"I write to discover what I know."
— 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)

""She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.""
— 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 truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally."
— 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."
— Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories)

"Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them."
— Flannery O'Connor

"All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal."
— Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories)

"There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth."
— Flannery O'Connor (Wise Blood: A Novel)

"When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor)

"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.

I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."
— Flannery O'Connor (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

"When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic."
— Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories)

"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location."
— Flannery O'Connor

"Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way."
— Flannery O'Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor)