Flannery O'Connor
...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.Collection: Struggle
You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.Collection: People
You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.Collection: Funny
I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.Collection: Inspiring
A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.Collection: Writing
[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .Collection: Humility
What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.Collection: Thinking
All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.Collection: Catholic
One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.Collection: Sweet
Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.Collection: Dark
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 upon It will keep you free - not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects around you.Collection: Christian
A God you understood would be less than yourself.Collection: Would Be
It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truthCollection: Artist
Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.Collection: Southern
Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Light
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.Collection: Reading
Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.Collection: Writing
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.Collection: Mean
I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.Collection: Eye
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.Collection: Fall
People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.Collection: Writing
I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.Collection: People
The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying attention to the sky.Collection: Stars
I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Writing
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.Collection: Character
When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.Collection: Writing
I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.Collection: Eye
I am much younger now than I was at twelve or anyway, less burdened.Collection: Self Confidence
If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.Collection: Writing
It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.Collection: Sweat
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.Collection: Writing
It was not right to believe anything you couldn't see or hold in your hands or test with your teeth.Collection: Believe
Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!Collection: Looks
I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.Collection: Mean
Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.Collection: Pleasure
... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.Collection: Men
Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.Collection: Happiness
Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Jesus
When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.... Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Mother
Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.Collection: Firsts
I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil. I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow.Collection: Reading
You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Country
I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.Collection: Writing
You can't clobber any reader while he's looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.Collection: Attention