Flannery O'Connor Quotes - Page 3

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.

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

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.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

He had a winning smile and it was evident that he didn't think he was any better than anybody else even though he was.

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

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

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

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

Remember what you won't get if you don't mind," her grandfather remarked.

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

I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway less burdened.

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.

The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.

When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle.

No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist.

Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.

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.