Flannery O'Connor Quotes

Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat -- it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

If I have not lost my mind I can sometimes hear it preparing to defect

Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.

If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.

The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.

I had to hold my head up high and put a bold face on things, but the thoughts keep coming anyways.

I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell; I know right now you can't tell; But stay a while and maybe then you'll see; A different side of me

Here's what breaks us: Even though we know better, we still want everything to be all right.

There's certainly a side of me that isn't completely... sane. Or completely 'even' all the time. We all have our dark sides.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

I have lived one step away from losing my mind for years. I am quick and accurate in spotting unstable streaks in others.

Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.

[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

What could he mean by speaking so, as if I were always thinking that he cared for me, when I know he does not; he cannot. ... But I won't care for him. I surely am mistress enough of myself to control this wild, strange, miserable feeling

For years I have endeavored to calm an impetuous tide -- laboring to make my feelings take an orderly course -- it was striving against the stream.

When you live as I do, you cannot indulge in jealousy. If you do, it will rip you apart.

Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

Part of him wanted to weep... but his purpose was rigid within him. He felt he could not bend to gentleness without breaking.

Will is not unfrequently weakness.

It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become irrevocable--when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon us--that tests our strength. Then, after hours of clear reasoning and firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify our long struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better than victory.