522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain.

When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.

Unfortunately, to try to disconnect faith from vision is to do violence to the whole personality, and the whole personality participates in the act of writing. The tensions of being a Catholic novelist are probably never balanced for the writer until the Church becomes so much a part of his personality that he can forget about her – in the same sense that when he writes, he forgets about himself.

In my travels I am often asked if college stifles young writers. In my opinion, it doesn’t stifle them enough.

Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don’t know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don’t suppose I would write the story.

Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn’t stifle enough of them.

Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren’t is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.

I am going to be the World Authority on Peafowl, and I hope to be offered a chair some day at the Chicken College.