The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor Quotes

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

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It...

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer i...

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

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

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced b...

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

I don’t really think the standard of judgment, the missing link, you spoke of that you find in my stories emerges from any religion but Christianity, because it concerns specifically Christ and the Incarnation, the fact that there has been a unique...

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

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

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor