The Habit of Being Quotes

“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”
― 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

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of 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

“I love a lot of people, understand none of them...”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of 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

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child's faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you fell you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of 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

“Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“...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.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: “If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product.” My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you’re not a lady? she says.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“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

“In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery...”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“[Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny. ”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity...”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“...what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor