Flannery O'Connor

Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.

I tried to fast one time but somebody beat me to it.

There's some folks that thinks they gotta do all the believing and all the repenting. They think they gotta make up their mind to save and repent and believe all in a minute and a half and then do good for the rest of their life so they can save their soul from hell, like they was pulling on a trolley car and could climb up inside the street car and go on out to the end of the line where it was all flowers.

The same blood that ran in the Sutpen’s sons ran in his slaves—every drop of it. Yet no one would claim them for Sutpen. Which proves that there are things which even Sutpen won’t do.

If there’s one thing second-hand preaching style will not abide, it is a call to ecclesiastical obedience.

Well, I believe in movement. Not in change, but in movement. The only thing I saw wrong with the world in the old days was that it was static.

I don’t know how to talk about the South. I don’t know. Maybe it’s got something to do with the land and the winters.

If you own anything it's because you have made something of it. If you buy anything, and then sell it, you have made something of it. And you can't own anything unless you did make something of it.

I have always thought that a man can do the right thing in the wrong time, and if he does, it amounts to the wrong thing.

When a man has nothing to worry about, he does not write a book. It is when he has a real concern that he writes.

The best way to avoid Jesus is to avoid sin.

I don’t preach against anything. I don’t preach fire and brimstone sermons. I preach that Christ was crucified and rose from the dead.