Flannery O'Connor Quotes

We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us.

When I lived in Cookham I was disturbed by a feeling of everything being meaningless.But quite suddenly I became aware that everything was full of special meaning and this made everything holy... I observed this sacred quality in most unexpected quarters.

Measure your growth in grace by your sensitiveness to sin.

Tokyo Sonata speaks to us, with feeling and passion, as one of the most eloquent statements on the world today that we are likely to see in this moviegoing year.

Spiritual awakening is the most essential thing in man's life, and it is the sole purpose of being. Is not civilization, in all its tragic forms, a supreme motive for spiritual awakening?

The fearsome blessing of that hard time continues to work itself out in my life in the same way we're told the universe is still hurtling through outer space under the impact of the great cosmic explosion.... I think grace sometimes explodes into our lives like that-sending our pain, terror, astonishment hurtling through inner space until by grace they become Orion, Cassiopeia, Polaris to give us our bearings, to bring us into something like full being at last.

The schizoid man is the natural product of the technological man. It is one way to live and is increasingly utilized and it may explode into violence.

Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.

Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.

I think that right now we're in a very hard moment and off-putting. I mean, look at shoes today - women's shoes. They couldn't possibly get any higher and meaner and sharper. But then again, you go and watch most films today, they're violent and we're living in a world that is, at the moment, quite hard.

Before the work of grace the heart is ‘stony.’ It can do no more than a stone can do to please God.

Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.

A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.

The experience of being depressed and emerging from depression made me understand the idea of a soul. I felt that the language in which one could best acknowledge that drew from faith.

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.

Truth is, right now two bombs could drop out of the sky and blow up this house and whatever building you're in and just obliterate Dischord and Pitchfork. And there'll be some people crying, there'll be some slow singing, but for 99% of the world, it won't even affect the fly on their soup. Most of the world never have, or ever will hear of me, Fugazi, or Pitchfork. Right now, someone just got killed in Ukraine. Do you feel any different?

Loving a holy God is beyond our moral power. The only kind of God we can love by our sinful nature is an unholy god, an idol made by our own hands. Unless we are born of the Spirit of God, unless God sheds His holy love in our hearts, unless He stoops in His grace to change our hearts, we will not love Him... To love a holy God requires grace, grace strong enough to pierce our hardened hearts and awaken our moribund souls.

We live in an age disturbed, confused, bewildered, afraid of its own forces, in search not merely of its road but even of its direction

There's always another level up. There's always another ascension. More grace, more light, more generosity, more compassion, more to shed, more to grow.

A man may just as soon read the Scripture without eyes, as understand the spirit of it without grace.

We live in an age when there is a false glare on the things of time and a great mist over the things of eternity.

She's beautiful and graceful, and she is very compassionate and loyal when you aren't responsible for the murder of her family.

There is this feeling that I have a destiny far away from the shallow and preposterous posing that is our life.

I don't understand anything. Life is so strange. I feel like some one who's lived all his life by a duck-pond and suddenly is shown the sea. It makes me a little breathless, and yet it fills me with elation. I don't want to die, I want to live. I'm beginning to feel a new courage. I feel like one of those old sailors who set sail for undiscovered seas and I think my soul hankers for the unknown.