Flannery O'connor Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Flannery O'connor
Flannery O'connor Quotes & Sayings
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Some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation.
— Flannery O'Connor
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
— Flannery O'Connor
The dead don't bother with particulars.
— Flannery O'Connor
The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.
— Flannery O'Connor
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
— Flannery O'Connor
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
— Flannery O'Connor
What they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.
— Flannery O'Connor
A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.
— Flannery O'Connor
You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will.
— Flannery O'Connor
The formality that is left in the South now is quite dead and done for of course.
— Flannery O'Connor
When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself.
— Flannery O'Connor
My heroine already is, and is Hulga.
— Flannery O'Connor
Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.
— Flannery O'Connor
Remember what you won't get if you don't mind, her grandfather remarked.
— Flannery O'Connor
Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.
— Flannery O'Connor
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
— Flannery O'Connor
The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.
— Flannery O'Connor
I don't have to run from anything because I don't believe in anything.
— Flannery O'Connor
Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.
— Flannery O'Connor
I am the menial, at the beck and squawk of any feathered worthy who wants service.
— Flannery O'Connor
This shiffer-robe belongs to Hazel Motes. Do not steal it or you will be hunted down and killed.
— Flannery O'Connor
Unadaptability is often a virtue.
— Flannery O'Connor
In yourself right now is all the place you've got.
— Flannery O'Connor
You shall know the truth, and it will make you odd.
— Flannery O'Connor
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
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
— Flannery O'Connor
No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist. The devil is the greatest believer and he has his reasons.
— Flannery O'Connor
After a while he said, If there's no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.
— Flannery O'Connor
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
Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!
— Flannery O'Connor
She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.
— Flannery O'Connor
A God you understood would be less than yourself.
— Flannery O'Connor
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
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
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
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
— Flannery O'Connor
Tennessee's a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia's a lousy state too.
— Flannery O'Connor
It's no part of your job to think for the Lord," his great-uncle said. "Judgment may rack your bones.
— Flannery O'Connor
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
— Flannery O'Connor
Kindness and patience were always called for ...
— Flannery O'Connor
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
I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.
— Flannery O'Connor
Jesus thrown everything off balance.
— Flannery O'Connor
His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it.
— Flannery O'Connor
I can smell the sin on your breath.
— Flannery O'Connor
I don't want to pretend like I'm some intellectual person who understands Flannery O'Connor.
— Sara Zarr
Wesley, the younger child, had had rheumatic fever when he was seven and Mrs. May thought this was what had caused him to be an intellectual.
— Flannery O'Connor
There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.
— Flannery O'Connor
Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it
— Flannery O'Connor
It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth
— Flannery O'Connor
What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
— Flannery O'Connor
When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.
— Flannery O'Connor
When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and was very dramatic.
— Flannery O'Connor
Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.
— Flannery O'Connor
If you're a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.
— Flannery O'Connor
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.
— Flannery O'Connor
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
I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.
— Flannery O'Connor
The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
— Dean Koontz
Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
— Flannery O'Connor
Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.
— Flannery O'Connor
Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven.
— Flannery O'Connor
Christianity is a strangely cheery religion.
— Flannery O'Connor
I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.
— Kiran Desai
My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.
— Flannery O'Connor
Mrs. Pritchard could not stand an anticlimax. She required the taste of blood from time to time to keep her equilibrium.
— Flannery O'Connor
Most things are beyond me," Block said. "I ain't found anything yet that I thoroughly understood,
— Flannery O'Connor
The grandmother decided that she would not mention that the house was in Tennessee.
— Flannery O'Connor
Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn't conceive of any other condition.
— Flannery O'Connor
I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
— Flannery O'Connor
I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing.
— Flannery O'Connor
He had a winning smile and it was evident that he didn't think he was any better than anybody else even though he was.
— Flannery O'Connor
Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.
— Flannery O'Connor
The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.
— Flannery O'Connor
The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.
— Flannery O'Connor
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
— Flannery O'Connor
![Flannery O'connor Quotes By Flannery O'Connor: The reader may not see [these meanings], but](https://www.wisefamousquotes.com/images/flannery-oconnor-quotes-by-flannery-oconnor-64800.jpg "Flannery O'connor Quotes By Flannery O'Connor: The reader may not see [these meanings], but")
The reader may not see [these meanings], but they have their effect on him nonetheless. This is the way the modern novelist sinks, or hides his theme
— Flannery O'Connor
Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.
— Flannery O'Connor
To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape cam from the hand of Providence.
— Flannery O'Connor
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
I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.
— Flannery O'Connor
Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.
— Flannery O'Connor
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
She didn't like to admit it about her own kin, least about her own brother, but there he was - good for absolutely nothing.
— Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor once told a young friend to "push as hard as the age that pushes against you.
— Tish Harrison Warren
I sure am sick of the Civil War.
— Flannery O'Connor
To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.
— Flannery O'Connor
He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.
— Flannery O'Connor
The two worst sins of bad taste in fiction are pornography and sentimentality. One is too much sex and the other too much sentiment.
— Flannery O'Connor
Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.
— Flannery O'Connor
The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.
— Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor's brief life and slim output were nonetheless marked by piercing powers of observation.
— Floyd Skloot
Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.
— Flannery O'Connor
You might as well go one place as another," he said. "That's all I know.
— Flannery O'Connor
I have one of those food-chopper brains that nothing comes out of the way it went in.
— Flannery O'Connor
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
I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.
— Flannery O'Connor
The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don't hold nothing back.
— Flannery O'Connor
The trouble with the world was that nobody stopped or took any care.
— Flannery O'Connor