Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I write to discover what I know.”

— Flannery O'Connor

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

2. “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

— Flannery O'Connor

3. “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

6. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

8. “Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.”

— Flannery O'Connor

9. “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

— Flannery O'Connor

10. “A God you understood would be less than yourself.”

— Flannery O'Connor

11. “If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.”

— Flannery O'Connor

12. “You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.”

— Flannery O'Connor

13. “Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

15. “Kindness and patience were always called for...”

— Flannery O'Connor

16. “Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

18. “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

19. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

21. “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

22. “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

23. “In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite.”

— Flannery O'Connor

24. “If there were no hell, we would be like the animals. No hell, no dignity.”

— Flannery O'Connor

25. “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

26. “She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”

— Flannery O'Connor

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.”

— Flannery O'Connor

30. “To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

— Flannery O'Connor

31. “You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”

— Flannery O'Connor

32. “Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.”

— Flannery O'Connor

33. “I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.”

— Flannery O'Connor

34. “It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.”

— Flannery O'Connor

35. “The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.”

— Flannery O'Connor

36. “Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”

— Flannery O'Connor

37. “I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

39. “I have what passes for an education in this day and time, but I am not deceived by it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

44. “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”

— Flannery O'Connor

45. “I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in relation to that.”

— Flannery O'Connor

46. “When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

48. “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

49. “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

50. “I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.”

— Flannery O'Connor