Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.

— Flannery O'Connor

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

— Flannery O'Connor

Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.

— Flannery O'Connor

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.

— Flannery O'Connor

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

— Flannery O'Connor

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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 this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was 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... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

— Flannery O'Connor

Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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 have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.

— Flannery O'Connor

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . . .

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor