522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

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.

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. . . . [Thus] 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.

The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity...

I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.

The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.

Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story-just like the typewriter was mine.

In the name of social order, liberal thought, and sometimes even Christianity, the novelist is asked to be the handmaid of his age.

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.

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.