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Flannery O’Connor Quotes

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. Her writing also reflected her Roman Catholic faith and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics. Her posthumously compiled Complete Stories won the 1972 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and has been the subject of enduring praise.

✵ 25. March 1925 – 3. August 1964  •  Other names Mary Flannery O'Connor, แฟลนเนอรี โอคอนเนอร์, فلانری اوکانر
Flannery O’Connor photo

Works

Wise Blood
Wise Blood
Flannery O’Connor
The Complete Stories
The Complete Stories
Flannery O’Connor
The Violent Bear It Away
The Violent Bear It Away
Flannery O’Connor
Wise Blood
Wise Blood
Flannery O’Connor
The Complete Stories
The Complete Stories
Flannery O’Connor
The Violent Bear It Away
The Violent Bear It Away
Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor: 82 quotes22 likes

Famous Flannery O’Connor Quotes

“I love a lot of people, understand none of them…”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“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

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

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

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor Quotes about thinking

“Doctors always think anybody doing something they aren't is a quack; also they think all patients are idiots.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“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

Source: A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“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

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

Flannery O’Connor

“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

“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

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor Quotes about life

“The life you save may very well be your own.”

Flannery O’Connor

“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathe News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”

Flannery O’Connor

“When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

Flannery O’Connor: Trending quotes

“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 book Wise Blood

Source: Wise Blood

“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

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Flannery O’Connor Quotes

“I write to discover what I know.”

Flannery O’Connor

“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of 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

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of 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 can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”

Flannery O’Connor book Wise Blood

Source: Wise Blood

“The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.”

Flannery O’Connor book The Complete Stories

Source: The Complete Stories

“Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“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

Source: Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“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

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”

Flannery O’Connor

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism… it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”

Flannery O’Connor

“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 book The Complete Stories

Source: The Complete Stories

“It's easier to bleed than sweat, Mr. Motes.”

Flannery O’Connor book Wise Blood

Source: Wise Blood

“There are all kinds of truth… but behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.”

Flannery O’Connor book Wise Blood

Source: Wise Blood

“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

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“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

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Grace changes us and change is painful".”

Flannery O’Connor

“The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.”

Flannery O’Connor

“She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“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

Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

Flannery O’Connor book Wise Blood

Source: Wise Blood

“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

“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

Source: A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”
(August 9, 1955)”

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

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”

Flannery O’Connor

“Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.”

Flannery O’Connor

Source: Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“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

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