Frank O'Connor Quotes

#1. No man is as anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.

Frank O'Connor

#2. All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.

Frank O'Connor

#3. The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.

Frank O'Connor

#4. Tom looked more and more like a rabbi. As is the way of men of character in provincial towns, he tended to become a collection of mannerisms, a caricature of himself.

Frank O'Connor

#5. I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whole world is in it, and bit by bit grows on us again till the day You find us out.

Frank O'Connor

#6. A grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.

Frank O'Connor

#7. A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.

Frank O'Connor

#8. Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society ... As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel
an intense awareness of human loneliness.

Frank O'Connor

#9. Even if there were only two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn't be happy. One them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things.

Frank O'Connor

#10. I cant write about something I dont admire. It goes back to the old concept of the celebration: you celebrate the hero, an idea.

Frank O'Connor

#11. But, Mummy, couldn't God make another wars, but bad people."
"Oh!" I said.
I was disappointed about that. I began to think that God wasn't quite what he was cracked up to be.

Frank O'Connor

#12. I was always a great believer in buttered toast.

Frank O'Connor

#13. But my dear young lady," he said offering a cigarette, "who ever said I have a poor opinion of women? On the contrary, I have a very high opinion of women, and the more I see of them the more I like them.

Frank O'Connor

#14. So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all the radiance and charm of a virgin of seventeen.

Frank O'Connor

#15. I was a great believer in hot buttered toast at all hours of the day.

Frank O'Connor