Flannery O'Connor
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.Collection: Believe
The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.Collection: Writing
He knew something was going to happen and his entire system was waiting on it. He thought it was going to be one of the supreme moments in life but apart from that, he didn't have the vaguest notion what it might be. He pictured himself, after it was over, as an entirely new man, with an even better personality than he had now. He sat there for about fifteen minutes and nothing happened.Collection: Men
... the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.Collection: Novelists
She felt that she would have to be much more than just a doctor or an engineer. She would have to be a saint.Collection: Doctors
You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.Collection: Real
Kindness and patience were always called for.Collection: Kindness
I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.Collection: Writing
There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.Collection: Jesus
He knew that he was the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made and that he had turned his destiny as if with his bare will. He kept himself upright on a very narrow line between madness and emptiness and when the time came for him to lose his balance he intended to lurch toward emptiness and fall on the side of his choice.Collection: Fall
I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.Collection: Issues
In yourself right now is all the place you've got.Collection: Self Esteem
Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.Collection: Ocean
I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.Collection: Christian
Unadaptability is often a virtue.Collection: Virtue
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.Collection: Teacher
The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.Collection: Looks
Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.Collection: Levels
Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.Collection: Sides
On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think...of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.Collection: Sex
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 itCollection: Gone
In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's mercies.Collection: Thinking
Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.Collection: Burden
One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.Collection: Christian
I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.Collection: Believe
Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Life
I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Real
To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.Collection: Hearing
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.Collection: Doctrine
If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.Collection: Past
It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.Collection: Real
Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.Collection: Faith
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.Collection: Dark
The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.Collection: Integrity
There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.Collection: Work Out
Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.Collection: Writing
...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.Collection: Believe
Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.Collection: Sickness
In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.Collection: Real
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.Collection: Experience
We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.Collection: Mean
A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.Collection: Devil
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.Collection: Judging
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.Collection: Charity
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.Collection: Law
She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.Collection: Saint
In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and politeCollection: Thinking