Flannery OConnor Quotes

You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.

You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.

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

[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 . . .

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

...you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.

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.

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

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.

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.

A God you understood would be less than yourself.

Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.

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.

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

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.

If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.

I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.