522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

Give me the grace to be impatient for the time when I shall see You face to face and need no stimulus than that to adore You.

He was singing a hillbilly song that sounded half like a love song and half like a hymn.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.

I’m a member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.

He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.

I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.

He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, ‘I ain’t got any tattoo on my back.’ ‘What you got on it?’ the girl said. ‘My shirt,’ Parker said. ‘Haw.’ ‘Haw, haw,’ the girl said politely.

The air was so quiet he could hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking in the water.