Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

“Ive felt too bad to type them.”

“The difficulty of all this,”

He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery...

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place youve got.

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

Everywhere I go Im asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they dont stifle enough of them. Theres many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

I dont deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

She wouldve been a good woman, said The Misfit, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... its the gas you breathe. If I hadnt had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

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

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody elses, but behind all of them, theres only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! 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. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place youve got.

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.

The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”(August 9, 1955)

People without hope not only dont write novels, but what is more to the point, they dont read them.