522 Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.

How would he know if time was going backwards or forwards or if he was going with it?

The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.

The nearness I mean comes after death perhaps. It is what we are struggling for and if I found it either I would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be intolerable.

You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you make live.

Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn’t conceive of any other condition.

I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity – what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.

A cloud, the exact color of the boy’s hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him.

The fact is that if the writer’s attention is on producing a work of art, a work that is good in itself, he is going to take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to this central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses. They call attention to themselves and distract from the work as a whole.