Flannery O'Connor Quotes
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She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint.
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A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.
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But learned people can analyze for me why I fear hell and their implication is that there is no hell. But I believe in hell. Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earth-seeming thing. I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God.
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Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.
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[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .
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Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.
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I do not know You, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
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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.
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That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
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Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.
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The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
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Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.
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I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
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I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.
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It is a sign of maturity... to find explanations in charity.
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I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
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The dead don't bother with particulars.
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Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
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I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.
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Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.
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Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
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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.
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I don't have my novel outlined, and 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 over again.
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Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.