Flannery O'Connor Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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 don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.

I don’t have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.

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

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.

My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.