Top 100 Flannery O'Connor Quotes
#1. If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you'll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.
Flannery O'Connor
#2. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Flannery O'Connor
#5. Man's desire for God is bedded in his unconscious & seeks to satisfy itself in physical possession of another human. This necessarily is a passing, fading attachment in its sensuous aspects since it is a poor substitute for what the unconscious is after.
Flannery O'Connor
#6. Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.
Her response was, If it's only a symbol, to hell with it.
Flannery O'Connor
#7. The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.
Flannery O'Connor
#8. The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.
Flannery O'Connor
#9. Julian thought he could have stood his lot better if she had been selfish, if she had been an old hag who drank and screamed at him. He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.
Flannery O'Connor
#10. Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack.
Flannery O'Connor
#11. The straightforward manner is seldom equal to the complications of the good subject. There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.
Flannery O'Connor
#12. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
Flannery O'Connor
#13. From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don't look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.
Flannery O'Connor
#14. To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility ...
Flannery O'Connor
#15. The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.
Flannery O'Connor
#16. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.
Flannery O'Connor
#17. Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.
Flannery O'Connor
#18. [Writing about her address to a ladies club]: The heart of my message to them was that they would all fry in Hell if they didn't quit reading trash.
Flannery O'Connor
#19. Did you see the picture of Roy Rogers's horse attending a church service in Pasadena? I forgot whether his name was Tex or Trigger but he was dressed fit to kill and looked like he was having a good time. He doubled the usual attendance.
Flannery O'Connor
#20. All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.
Flannery O'Connor
#21. There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Flannery O'Connor
#22. The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art.
Flannery O'Connor
#23. You remain what you are. - Everything That Rises Must Converge
Flannery O'Connor
#24. You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people's sufferings and not your own.
Flannery O'Connor
#25. If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.
Flannery O'Connor
#26. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.
Flannery O'Connor
#27. The formality that is left in the South now is quite dead and done for of course.
Flannery O'Connor
#29. Two people can remain "in love"
a phrase made practically useless by stinking romanticism
only if their common desire for each other unites in a greater desire for God.
Flannery O'Connor
#31. Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.
Flannery O'Connor
#33. It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing. I
Flannery O'Connor
#34. A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.
Flannery O'Connor
#35. In most good stories it is the character's personalty that creates the action of the story.
Flannery O'Connor
#36. Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people.
Flannery O'Connor
#37. Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
Flannery O'Connor
#38. The Bible was the only book he read. He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.
Flannery O'Connor
#39. There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Flannery O'Connor
#40. I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
Flannery O'Connor
#41. The daughter sat down too and watched him with a cautious sly look as if he were a bird that had come up very close.
Flannery O'Connor
#42. The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
Flannery O'Connor
#43. Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.
Flannery O'Connor
#44. True culture is in the mind, the mind," he said, and tapped his head, "the mind." "It's in the heart," she said, "and in how you do things and how you do things is because of who you are." "Nobody in the damn bus cares who you are." "I care who I am," she said icily.
Flannery O'Connor
#46. You can't just say NO," he said. "You got to do NO. You got to show it. You got to show you mean it by doing it. You got to show you're not going to do one thing by doing another. You got to make an end of it. One way or another.
Flannery O'Connor
#47. We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.
Flannery O'Connor
#48. There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.
Flannery O'Connor
#49. Mrs. Pritchard could not stand an anticlimax. She required the taste of blood from time to time to keep her equilibrium.
Flannery O'Connor
#50. It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.
Flannery O'Connor
#51. I never understand how writers can succumb to vanity - what you work the hardest on is usually the worst.
Flannery O'Connor
#52. It's no part of your job to think for the Lord," his great-uncle said. "Judgment may rack your bones.
Flannery O'Connor
#53. The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity ...
Flannery O'Connor
#54. The kiss, which had more pressure than feeling behind it, produced that extra surge of adrenalin in the girl that enables one to carry a packed trunk out of a burning house, but in her, the power went at once to the brain.
Flannery O'Connor
#55. People without hope do not write novels ... [Writing fiction] is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal.
Flannery O'Connor
#56. The virtue of hope, in Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust.
Flannery O'Connor
#57. When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle.
Flannery O'Connor
#59. The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.
Flannery O'Connor
#60. Elizabeth Hardwick told me once that all her first drafts sounded as if a chicken had written them. So do mine for the most part.
Flannery O'Connor
#61. Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
Flannery O'Connor
#64. Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.
Flannery O'Connor
#65. He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.
Flannery O'Connor
#67. It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming.
Flannery O'Connor
#68. A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.
Flannery O'Connor
#69. Nothing needs to happen to a writer's life after they are 20. By then they've experienced more than enough to last their creative life.
Flannery O'Connor
#70. That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
Flannery O'Connor
#71. I have 50 or 60 pages on the [new] novel but I still expect to be a long time at it. It's a theme that requires prayer and fasting to make it get anywhere. I manage to pray but am a very sloppy faster.
Flannery O'Connor
#72. Harcourt sent my book to Evelyn Waugh and his comment was: "If this is really the unaided work of a young lady, it is a remarkable product." My mother was vastly insulted. She put the emphasis on if and lady. Does he suppose you're not a lady? she says.
Flannery O'Connor
#73. The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.
Flannery O'Connor
#74. I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
Flannery O'Connor
#75. My dear God, I am impressed with how much I have to be thankful for in a material sense; and in a spiritual sense I have the opportunity of being even more fortunate. But it seems apparent to me that I am not translating this opportunity into fact.
Flannery O'Connor
#76. Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.
Flannery O'Connor
#77. Hazel Motes sat at a forward angel on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car.
Flannery O'Connor
#78. She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.
Flannery O'Connor
#79. Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.
Flannery O'Connor
#80. I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.
Flannery O'Connor
#81. My own approach to literary problems is very like the one Dr. Johnson's blind housekeeper used when she poured tea-she put her finger inside the cup.
Flannery O'Connor
#82. Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
Flannery O'Connor
#84. I believe the teacher's work is largely negative, that it is largely a matter of saying, "This doesn't work because ... " or "This does work because ... " The because is very important. The teacher can help you understand the nature of your medium, and he can guide you in your reading.
Flannery O'Connor
#86. He was pleased that she should see death in his face at once. His mother, at the age of sixty, was going to be introduced to reality and he supposed that if the experience didn't kill her, it would assist her in the process of growing up. He stepped down and greeted her.
Flannery O'Connor
#87. My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.
Flannery O'Connor
#88. You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.
Flannery O'Connor
#89. If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.
Flannery O'Connor
#90. Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
Flannery O'Connor
#92. He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror. A feeble cry, a last impossible protest escaped him. But the Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend.
Flannery O'Connor
#93. The boy knew that escaping school was the surest sign of his election.
Flannery O'Connor
#95. Mrs. May winced. She thought the word Jesus should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.
Flannery O'Connor
#96. She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody to shoot her every day of her life.
Flannery O'Connor
#97. To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
Flannery O'Connor
#98. I hope you understand that it is not the tooth of the saber-toothed tiger I want, it is the tiger. I don't care if it's a old toothless tiger or not, just so it's alive. I intend to start a zoo.
Flannery O'Connor
#99. In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite
Flannery O'Connor
#100. It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
Flannery O'Connor
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