The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so as far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not. The Christian writer particularly will feel that whatever his initial gift is, it comes from God; and no matter how minor a gift it is, he will not be willing to destroy it by trying to use it outside its proper limits.

— Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Librarians are the last people you can trust about the inside of books.

— Flannery O'Connor

It’s just like any other city and cities ain’t all that complicated.” But they were. New York was swishing and jamming one minute and dirty and dead the next.

— Flannery O'Connor

She was seeing that her father spent his last years with his own family and not in a decayed boarding house full of old women whose heads jiggled. She was doing her duty. She had brothers and sisters who were not.

— Flannery O'Connor

The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them.

— Flannery O'Connor

We’re all damned,” she said, “but some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.

— Flannery O'Connor

The misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with Jesus.

— Flannery O'Connor

The misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with Jesus. When the army finally let him go, he was pleased to think that he was still uncorrupted. All he wanted was to get back to Eastrod, Tennessee. The black Bible and his mother’s glasses were still in the bottom of his duffel bag. He didn’t read any book now but he kept the Bible because it had come from home. He kept the glasses in case his vision should ever become dim.

— Flannery O'Connor

He was four or five.

— Flannery O'Connor

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods. Nearer, the plowed fields curved and faded and the few hogs nosing in the furrows looked like large spotted stones. Mrs.

— Flannery O'Connor

You found out more when you left where you lived. He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ.

— Flannery O'Connor

I just know you’re a good man,” she said desperately. “You’re not a bit common!

— Flannery O'Connor

His thoughts were heavy as if they had to struggle up through some dense medium to reach the surface of his mind.

— Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor considered herself “a very innocent speller.” Spelling has therefore been corrected in this transcription of A Prayer Journal, so that the reader is not distracted.

— Flannery O'Connor

A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens. He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do.

— Flannery O'Connor

Mr. Head turned slowly. He felt he knew now what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light and what man would be like without salvation.

— Flannery O'Connor

Eastrod filled his head and then went out beyond and filled the space that stretched from the train across the empty darkening fields.

— Flannery O'Connor

The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.

— Flannery O'Connor

Turn to the right, it was a wall,” The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. “Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come.

— Flannery O'Connor

He didn’t have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again.

— Flannery O'Connor

My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. ‘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
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