522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

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.

Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.

It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.

Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.

She would have been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

Tennessee’s a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia’s a lousy state too.

The old woman’s three mountains were black against the dark blue sky and were visited off and on by various planets and by the moon after it had left the chickens.