Flannery O'Connor

"We cannot change the past, but we can change how we interpret it."

"A story is successful when it surprises the writer as much as the reader."

"The novelist is a messenger of truth wrapped in a disguise of fiction."

"The absence of faith is not the same as the absence of God."

"Goodness is something that makes the heart swell."

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

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

"I write to discover what I believe."

"Belief, in the way I mean it, is the engine that makes perception possible."

"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that freaks out a freak observer more."

"A misery no one could relieve because no one believed there was anything to be relieved."

"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."

"The old lady's head cleared for an instant and she realized something that no religion had ever taught her."

"Most people are better off dead."

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

"The grotesque has always lurked behind the surface of southern life."

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."

"Once a woman has decided that her husband is no good, even his best actions look suspicious."

"There is a moment in every child's life when he realizes who his parents are and accepts them as they are."

"The kind of vision the Christian fiction writer is supposed to have increases, rather than decreases, his respect for the concrete."

"The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnate in real life."

"Intelligence is a gift that comes wrapped up in a responsibility."

"Compassion is a verb."

"The more you know about how things have always been, the better you are equipped to deal with things as they are."

"The Misfit said that the grandmother reminded him of a chicken."

"It is the business of fiction writers to make the grotesque believable."

"People don't recognize the devil when he's wearing a pleasant expression."

"Even if I lost my faith, I would still have the Church."

"I think it is looking rather hard at all the time that I write; that is what I think it is."

"She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."