Top 380 Flannery O'Connor Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.”

— Flannery O'Connor

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

65. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

67. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

76. “When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville.”

— Flannery O'Connor

77. “The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”

— Flannery O'Connor

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

81. “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

82. “I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.”

— Flannery O'Connor

83. “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

84. “The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it.”

— Flannery O'Connor

85. “Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding.”

— Flannery O'Connor

86. “Policy and politics generally go contrary to principle.”

— Flannery O'Connor

87. “You remain what you are. – Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

— Flannery O'Connor

88. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

90. “I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see.”

— Flannery O'Connor

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

— Flannery O'Connor

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

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

— Flannery O'Connor

96. “It was love without reason, love for something futureless, love that appeared to exist only to be itself, imperious and all demanding, the kind that would cause him to make a fool of himself in an instant.”

— Flannery O'Connor

97. “Tennessee’s a hillbilly dumping ground, and Georgia’s a lousy state too.”

— Flannery O'Connor

98. “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

99. “A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”

— Flannery O'Connor

100. “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