Flannery O'Connor Quotes

It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.

... Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.

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.

Christianity is a strangely cheery religion.

Poorly written novels--no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters--are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.

When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.

Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

I write to discover what I know.

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

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

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.

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.

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.

You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.

Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.

Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.

...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.

I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.

...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.

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.

Go warn the children of God of the terrible speed of mercy.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our turn to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ's death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.

You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!

If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.

Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

I have almost no capacity for worship. What I have is the knowledge that it is my duty to worship and worship only what I believe to be true.” May 19, 1962

On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think...of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

I believe the teacher's work is largely negative, that it is largely a matter of saying, "This doesn't work because ..." or "This does work because ..." The because is very important. The teacher can help you understand the nature of your medium, and he can guide you in your reading.

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.

When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.

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.

...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.

The life you save may very well be your own.

If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.