Flannery O'Connor Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Flannery O'Connor on Wise Famous Quotes.
Some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation.
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.
Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.
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.
Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story-just like the typewriter was mine.
My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.
In the name of social order, liberal thought, and sometimes even Christianity, the novelist is asked to be the handmaid of his age.
People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.
It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.
The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.
(August 9, 1955)
(August 9, 1955)
Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.
I am going to be the World Authority on Peafowl, and I hope to be offered a chair some day at the Chicken College.
If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.
The houses were squat and almost identical and each one had a square of grass in front of it like a dog gripping a stolen steak.
The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.
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
There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
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.
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity ...
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
Give me the grace to be impatient for the time when I shall see You face to face and need no stimulus than that to adore You.
It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.
We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.
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.
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.