Flannery O'Connor Quotes

I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.

Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.

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.

The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

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.

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means 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.

I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

Grace changes us and change is painful".

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.

[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.

She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

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.

All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.

Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.