The voices / 145 fragments

Flannery O'Connor

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Archive entries

01Undated

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...

Flannery O'Connor / quote

02Undated

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.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

03Undated

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

04Undated

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles 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.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

05Undated

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

06Undated

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

07Undated

She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

08Undated

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

09Undated

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.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

10Undated

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.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

11Undated

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!

Flannery O'Connor / quote

12Undated

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

Flannery O'Connor / quote

13Undated

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

14Undated

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! 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 it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

15Undated

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

16Undated

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.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

17Undated

The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”(August 9, 1955)

Flannery O'Connor / quote

18Undated

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

19Undated

We live in an unbelieving age but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual. There is one type of modern man who recognizes spirit in himself but who fails to recognize a being outside himself whom he can adore as Creator and Lord; consequently he has become his own ultimate concern. He says with Swinburne, "Glory to man in the highest, for he is the master of things," or with Steinbeck, "In the end was the word and the word was with men." For him, man has his own natural spirit of courage and dignity and pride and must consider it a point of honor to be satisfied with this. There is another type of modern man who recognizes a divine being not himself, but who does not believe that this being can be known anagogically or defined dogmatically or received sacramentally. Spirit and matter are separated for him. Man wanders about, caught in a maze of guilt he can't identify, trying to reach a God he can't approach, a God powerless to approach him. And there is another type of modern man who can neither believe nor contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the lost God.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

20Undated

It is when the individual's faith is weak, not strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

21Undated

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.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

22Undated

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. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

23Undated

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.

Flannery O'Connor / quote

24Undated

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.

Flannery O'Connor / quote