Top 100 O'flannery Quotes

#1. For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #2902
#2. 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

O'flannery Quotes #3739
#3. 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

O'flannery Quotes #4047
#4. 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

O'flannery Quotes #11545
#5. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #13238
#6. 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

O'flannery Quotes #24167
#7. A God you understood would be less than yourself.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #25108
#8. People only make us lonelier by reminding us of God.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #26974
#9. Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #43489
#10. Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #55900
#11. It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #57137
#12. 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

O'flannery Quotes #63791
#13. 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

O'flannery Quotes #69327
#14. 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

O'flannery Quotes #73090
#15. Anyone who survives a southern childhood has enough material to last a lifetime.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #73268
#16. 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

O'flannery Quotes #73628
#17. Nothing worth while comes easy. Hard work just makes you appreciate it more.

Constance O'Day-Flannery

O'flannery Quotes #74571
#18. 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

O'flannery Quotes #84454
#19. The life you save may very well be your own.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #84809
#20. 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

O'flannery Quotes #89850
#21. The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #105233
#22. 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

O'flannery Quotes #106996
#23. The reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #110218
#24. 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

O'flannery Quotes #112195
#25. 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

O'flannery Quotes #112204
#26. 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

O'flannery Quotes #114996
#27. 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

O'flannery Quotes #118146
#28. 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

O'flannery Quotes #119587
#29. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #119636
#30. 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

O'flannery Quotes #136459
#31. 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

O'flannery Quotes #138174
#32. No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.

David Sedaris

O'flannery Quotes #140180
#33. 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

O'flannery Quotes #141494
#34. 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

O'flannery Quotes #144467
#35. 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

O'flannery Quotes #146043
#36. 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

O'flannery Quotes #146673
#37. He had measured five feet four inches of pure gamecock.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #147386
#38. ...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

O'flannery Quotes #148763
#39. 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

O'flannery Quotes #150608
#40. 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

O'flannery Quotes #152667
#41. 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

O'flannery Quotes #158841
#42. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #161781
#43. I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #165296
#44. 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

O'flannery Quotes #167351
#45. 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

O'flannery Quotes #171206
#46. I was born in a wreck and my mothers a whore.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #172039
#47. 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

O'flannery Quotes #177917
#48. 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

O'flannery Quotes #193390
#49. 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

O'flannery Quotes #196699
#50. 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

O'flannery Quotes #208201
#51. 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

O'flannery Quotes #208292
#52. 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

O'flannery Quotes #208601
#53. 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

O'flannery Quotes #210290
#54. 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

O'flannery Quotes #213261
#55. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #217074
#56. 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

O'flannery Quotes #230626
#57. 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

O'flannery Quotes #235049
#58. 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

O'flannery Quotes #236756
#59. 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

O'flannery Quotes #242461
#60. I am not a warthog from hell.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #247800
#61. 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

O'flannery Quotes #252453
#62. 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

O'flannery Quotes #265324
#63. The only way to the truth is through blasphemy.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #287205
#64. I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #290848
#65. 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

O'flannery Quotes #305015
#66. There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #310143
#67. 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

O'flannery Quotes #323868
#68. 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

O'flannery Quotes #324008
#69. 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

O'flannery Quotes #328441
#70. I am the menial, at the beck and squawk of any feathered worthy who wants service.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #329321
#71. Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #329478
#72. Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #329634
#73. 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

O'flannery Quotes #329909
#74. 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

O'flannery Quotes #335725
#75. 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

O'flannery Quotes #336725
#76. 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

O'flannery Quotes #337085
#77. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

Dean Koontz

O'flannery Quotes #338964
#78. 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

O'flannery Quotes #339392
#79. 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

O'flannery Quotes #344638
#80. 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

O'flannery Quotes #349443
#81. This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #357075
#82. It is when the individual's faith is weak, not strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt gradually to be lost.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #370349
#83. Certainly, my exposure in high school to writers like Flannery O'Connor, Shusaku Endo, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Graham Greene was formative.

Phil Klay

O'flannery Quotes #373512
#84. The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #379247
#85. I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #392133
#86. A cloud, the exact color of the boy's hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #393862
#87. 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

O'flannery Quotes #398173
#88. 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

O'flannery Quotes #411650
#89. As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #418803
#90. He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery ...

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #420112
#91. Freedom is of no use without taste and without the ordinary competence to follow the particular laws of what we have been given to do.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #426482
#92. [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

O'flannery Quotes #426741
#93. 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

O'flannery Quotes #428295
#94. The novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #434513
#95. I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #437330
#96. You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.

Flannery O'Connor

O'flannery Quotes #440602
#97. 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

O'flannery Quotes #454521
#98. 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

O'flannery Quotes #458457
#99. I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

Ben Marcus

O'flannery Quotes #458699
#100. 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

O'flannery Quotes #458776

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