522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

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

Dear God, I don’t want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don’t want to have created God to my own image as they’re so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don’t let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it.

Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.

You don’t serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I’ll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.

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.

The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.

If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

Kindness and patience were always called for...

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