Flannery O'Connor

“Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.”

“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.”

“Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.”

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”

“I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

“The park was the heart of the city. He had come to the city – and with a knowing in his blood – he had established himself at the heart of it. Everyday he looked at the heart of it; every day; he was so stunned and awed and overwhelmed that just to think about it made him sweat. There was something, in the center of the park, that he had discovered. It was a mystery although it was in a glass case for everybody to see and there was a typewritten card over it telling all about it. But there was something the card couldn't say and what it couldn't say was inside him. He could not show the mystery to just anybody; but he had to show it to somebody. Who he had to show it to was a special person. This person could not be from the city but he didn't know why. He knew he would know him when he saw him and that he would have to see him soon or the nerve inside him would grow so big that he would be forced to steal a car or rob a bank or jump out of a dark alley onto a woman.”

“I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.”

“This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.”

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

“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

“As was usual with him, he began with the least important thing and worked around and in toward the center where the meaning was.”

“He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.”

“Listen, friends," said the disciple confidently, " [...] I didn't have a friend in the world. Do you know what it's like not to have a friend in the world?""It ain't no worsen havinum that would put a knife in your back when you wasn't looking," the older man said, barely parting his lips.”

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”

“Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.”

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

“...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.”

“...what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.”

“Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.”

“Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.”

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

“Wise Blood has reached the age of ten and is still alive. My critical powers are just sufficient to determine this, and I am gratified to be able to say it. The book was written with zest and, if possible, it should be read that way. It is a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death. Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for some readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them, Hazel Motes's integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author, Hazel's integrity lies in his not being able to do so. 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.(Preface to second edition, 1962)”

“Grace changes us and change is painful".”

“A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.”

“There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

“Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.”

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

“At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.”

“She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.”

“I write to discover what I know.”

“I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”

“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 you've got.”

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

“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

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

“I was born in a wreck and my mothers a whore.”

“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

“There are all kinds of truth ... but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”

“There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.”

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”

“I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories…. What kept me a skeptic [of secularism] in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read. If you want your faith, you have to work for it…. Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism.”

“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”

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”

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

“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”

“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.”

“Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.”

“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.”