522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that 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.... 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.

Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.

Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.

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

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