Flannery O'Connor Quotes

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any type of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of his country are the sides of his skull.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“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.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“He could have been dead and get all he got out of life but the exercise.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor: Featuring Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Violent Bear It Away, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and More

“Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Collected Works of Flannery O'Connor: Featuring Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Violent Bear It Away, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and More

“Librarians are the last people you can trust about the inside of books.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works