Quotes by Flannery O'Connor

“It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.”

“Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way ...”

“No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist.”

“He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery...”

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Not...”

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

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

“Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical po...”

“Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few ha...”

“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”

“You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everyth...”

“I do not like the raw sound of the human voice in unison unless it is under the discipline of music.”

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and ...”

“The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.”