522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn’t be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.

There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it.

You can’t just say NO,” he said. “You got to do NO. You got to show it. You got to show you mean it by doing it. You got to show you’re not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to make an end of it. One way or another.

Poorly written novels – no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters – are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.

And as for that strangeness in your gut, that comes from you, not the Lord. When you were a child you had worms. As likely as not you have them again.

I have tried imagining that the single peacock I see before me is the only one I have, but then one comes to join him, another flies off the roof, four or five crash out of the crepe-myrtle hedge; from the pond one screams and from the barn I hear the dairyman denouncing another that has got into the cow-feed. My kin are given to such phrases as, ‘Let’s face it.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I’m afraid it will not be controversial.

The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.