Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

53. “The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.”

— Flannery O'Connor

54. “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.”

— Flannery O'Connor

55. “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.”

— Flannery O'Connor

56. “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

57. “I am a Catholic not like someone else would be a Baptist or a Methodist, but like someone else would be an atheist.”

— Flannery O'Connor

58. “Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!”

— Flannery O'Connor

59. “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

60. “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

61. “I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.”

— Flannery O'Connor

62. “In most good stories, it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.”

— Flannery O'Connor

63. “If you’re a Catholic you believe what the Church teaches and the climate makes no difference.”

— Flannery O'Connor

64. “You don’t serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I’ll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

65. “Dear God, I don’t want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don’t want to have created God to my own image as they’re so fond of saying. Please give me the necessary grace, oh Lord, and please don’t let it be as hard to get as Kafka made it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

66. “Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.”

— Flannery O'Connor

67. “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she liver with, her only boy.”

— Flannery O'Connor

68. “Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.”

— Flannery O'Connor

69. “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

70. “I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”

— Flannery O'Connor

71. “There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.”

— Flannery O'Connor

72. “It is better to be young in your failures than old in your successes.”

— Flannery O'Connor

73. “Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

74. “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

75. “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

76. “Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine.”

— Flannery O'Connor

77. “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

78. “The only way to the truth is through blasphemy.”

— Flannery O'Connor

79. “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

80. “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

81. “The first product of self-knowledge is humility.”

— Flannery O'Connor

82. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

84. “She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody to shoot her every day of her life.”

— Flannery O'Connor

85. “I don’t want to be doomed to mediocrity in my feeling for Christ. I want to feel. I want to love. Take me, dear Lord, and set me in the direction I am to go.”

— Flannery O'Connor

86. “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

87. “You can’t clobber any reader while he’s looking. You divert his attention, then you clobber him and he never knows what hit him.”

— Flannery O'Connor

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.”

— Flannery O'Connor

92. “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

93. “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

— Flannery O'Connor

94. “A story has to have muscle as well as meaning, and the meaning has to be in the muscle.”

— Flannery O'Connor

95. “I suppose that is what we have to have to get grace. Give me the courage to stand the pain to get the grace, Oh Lord. Help me with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

96. “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

97. “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

98. “It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.”

— Flannery O'Connor

99. “I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.”

— Flannery O'Connor

100. “There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored.”

— Flannery O'Connor