Flannery O'Connor
50 quotes
Biography
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."
"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
"She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity."
"I don't 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."
"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."
"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd."
"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system."
"She would've been a good woman,"said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."
"Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better."
"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."
"The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree."
"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..."
"Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me."
"I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted."
"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."
"He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.''What you got on it?' the girl said.'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.''Haw, haw,' the girl said politely."
"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't 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."
"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."
"There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself."
"Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing."
"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."
"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."
"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."