Top 100 Flannery O Connor Quotes
#1. 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
#2. No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.
David Sedaris
#3. Be grateful for holiness when you find it among churchmen, but do not expect it. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others.
Rod Dreher
#4. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
Dean Koontz
#5. Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.
Phil Klay
#6. Many of the novelists I admire never left their hometown. Look at Flannery O'Connor. So many of the great Russians never left Russia. Shakespeare never left England. The list goes on.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#7. Wherever it left us,
we were barely learning to live with it
when here came Flannery O'Connor and Hank Williams
to tell us that no one has ever been loved
the way everybody wants to be loved,
and that's hard. That's hard.
last stanza of How Step by Step We Have Come to Understand
Miller Williams
#8. I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
Ben Marcus
#9. Flannery O'Connor once told a young friend to "push as hard as the age that pushes against you.
Tish Harrison Warren
#10. When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.
Frances Mayes
#11. Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
Robert Morgan
#12. All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.
Padgett Powell
#13. Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of "Wise Blood" that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote "Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant ...
Flannery O'Connor
#14. Jincy Willett, Sam Lipsyte, Flannery O'Connor, and George Saunders. Oh, and I love Paul Rudnick in The New Yorker.
Pamela Paul
#15. Jim Harrison's novels, John McPhee's nonfiction, Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the crime novels of John Sandford, Ken Bruen, and T. Jefferson Parker. His books
C.J. Box
#16. Flannery O'Connor's brief life and slim output were nonetheless marked by piercing powers of observation.
Floyd Skloot
#17. Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's.
Ron Rash
#18. In 1964, at the age of 39, Flannery O'Connor died from complications of lupus. She had lived with this autoimmune disease for 14 years, primarily confined to her mother's farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Ga.
Floyd Skloot
#19. I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O'Connor. She was a huge influence.
David Almond
#20. I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.
Kiran Desai
#21. I don't want to pretend like I'm some intellectual person who understands Flannery O'Connor.
Sara Zarr
#22. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "Religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it's a cross."13
Terryl L. Givens
#23. I am very indebted to southern writers and not just Flannery O'Connor. Also Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Tennessee Williams, Barry Hannah and William Gay.
Donald Ray Pollock
#24. Flannery O'Connor was a revelation for me. When I read her, I was very young, and I didn't understand what she was doing. I didn't see any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff.
Karin Slaughter
#25. For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.
Flannery O'Connor
#26. Mrs. Turpin felt entirely hollow except for her heart which swung from side to side as if it were agitated in a great empty drum of flesh
Flannery O'Connor
#27. A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.
Flannery O'Connor
#28. 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
#29. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Flannery O'Connor
#30. I don't have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.
Flannery O'Connor
#33. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.
Flannery O'Connor
#34. Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
Flannery O'Connor
#35. It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth
Flannery O'Connor
#36. 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
#37. Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
Flannery O'Connor
#38. He and the girl had almost nothing to say to each other. One thing he did say was, 'I ain't got any tattoo on my back.'
'What you got on it?' the girl said.
'My shirt,' Parker said. 'Haw.'
'Haw, haw,' the girl said politely.
Flannery O'Connor
#39. Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.
Flannery O'Connor
#40. And as for that strangeness in your gut, that comes from you, not the Lord. When you were a child you had worms. As likely as not you have them again.
Flannery O'Connor
#42. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from, and no Redemption because there was no Fall, and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.
Flannery O'Connor
#43. The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.
Flannery O'Connor
#44. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.
Flannery O'Connor
#46. At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.
Flannery O'Connor
#47. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee. Bailey
Flannery O'Connor
#48. Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
Flannery O'Connor
#49. I am very much afraid that to the fiction writer the fact that we shall always have the poor with us is a source of satisfaction,for it means, essentially, that he will always be able to find someone like himself.
Flannery O'Connor
#50. I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.
Flannery O'Connor
#51. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.
Flannery O'Connor
#52. I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.
Flannery O'Connor
#53. 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
#54. When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business.
Flannery O'Connor
#55. If we forget our past, we won't remember our future and it will be as well because we won't have one.
Flannery O'Connor
#56. Will you for God's sake get off that subject? Julian said. When he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for his mother's sins.
Flannery O'Connor
#57. On the subject of the feminist business, I just never think ... of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I divide people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex. Yes and there are the Medium Irksome and the Rare Irksome.
Flannery O'Connor
#59. ...they were all, if the truth was only known, a little bit off in their heads. What possible reason could a sane person have for wanting to not enjoy himself any more?
Flannery O'Connor
#60. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.
Flannery O'Connor
#61. The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.
Flannery O'Connor
#64. 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
#65. She appeared to adore Thomas's repugnance to her and to draw it out of him every chance she got as if it added delectably to her martyrdom.
Flannery O'Connor
#67. 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
#68. The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any type of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of his country are the sides of his skull.
Flannery O'Connor
#69. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorr.
Flannery O'Connor
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.
Flannery O'Connor
#73. Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor
#74. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O'Connor
#75. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
Flannery O'Connor
#76. Give me the grace to be impatient for the time when I shall see You face to face and need no stimulus than that to adore You.
Flannery O'Connor
#77. Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.
Flannery O'Connor
#78. When we get our spiritual house in order, we'll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don't expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.
Flannery O'Connor
#79. I have almost no capacity for worship. What I have is the knowledge that it is my duty to worship and worship only what I believe to be true.
May 19, 1962
Flannery O'Connor
#81. She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn't have the brains to avoid evil without it.
Flannery O'Connor
#82. 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
#84. I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
Flannery O'Connor
#85. The nearness I mean comes after death perhaps. It is what we are struggling for and if I found it either I would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be intolerable.
Flannery O'Connor
#86. There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.
Flannery O'Connor
#87. I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.
Flannery O'Connor
#88. 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
#89. When you leave a man alone with his Bible and the Holy Ghost inspires him, he's going to be a Catholic one way or another, even though he knows nothing about the visible church. His kind of Christianity may not be socially desirable, but will be real in the sight of God.
Flannery O'Connor
#90. I am the menial, at the beck and squawk of any feathered worthy who wants service.
Flannery O'Connor
#91. Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.
Flannery O'Connor
#93. There a series of Catholic rituals and teachings had offered her young life a coherent universe. By 1946, Savannah had for O'Connor ceded to the university world of Iowa, where new influences, including intellectual joys, brought with them questions and skepticism.
Flannery O'Connor
#94. At his desk, pen in hand, none was more articulate than Thomas. As soon as he found himself shut into the car with Sarah Ham, terror seized his tongue.
Flannery O'Connor
#95. 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
#96. Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues ... you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity ... you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.
Flannery O'Connor
#97. 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
#98. I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.
Flannery O'Connor
#99. Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.
Flannery O'Connor
#100. This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.
Flannery O'Connor
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