Flannery O'Connor

"The novel is a good way to investigate particular problems in depth."

"We are not our own light. We are not even dim lights; we are just to be vehicles for light."

"Grace changes us and the change is painful."

"The element of surprise is something that is woven throughout Scripture."

"The writer is only trying to enlarge people's sense of how things are."

"The hardest thing to believe will always be the truth."

"Dogma is the guardian of mystery."

"My subject in fiction is the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support grace."

"Mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind."

"The South is Christ-haunted but religiously impoverished."

"Everything that rises must converge toward truth."

"A good man is hard to find and even harder to believe in."

"Sarcasm is the refuge of those who are afraid of their own power."

"To understand the problem you must first inhabit it."

"The unbelief of others must not interfere with my own deepening faith."

"Distance between a writer and her work should be nonexistent."

"Your conscience is a hard master but an honest one."

"The writer is only trying to enlarge the sense of what is real."

"Violence is a force that can lead to revelation."

"I believe that we are here for a purpose and that the purpose has to do with the way we love one another."

"Fiction itself is a substitute for talking to yourself."

"It is better to be young and proud than old and humble."

"The truth will naturally be stranger than fiction."

"Most of us come to the Church by a humiliating route."

"Habits are hard to break, especially if they have been with you a long time."

"The morality of a piece of fiction depends on the precise location of the narrator."

"A man can ignore pain only so long before the pain ignores him."

"The novelist is an observer, first of all."

"You've got to be hard to survive in this world on your own."

"The mystery we are looking for is not something invented by the mind but something to be discovered."